When you are an American and you are living in Japan, you can get an international driving permit which lasts for one year and you can legally drive in Japan as long as you have your valid US license and passport. Since I already decided I would recontract and live here for another year, I must get a regular Japanese drivers license by August. The Japanese driving test is notorious for being extremely strict and difficult for foreigners. It is not uncommon for people to sometimes take the test 4 or 5 times before passing. Infact, passing on the first try is extremely rare. I researched the hell out of what to expect and studied the course map that I found online. Instead of going to work as usual to teach classes on Friday, my supervisor from the town office drove me down to Maebashi (the capital of my prefecture) to take this dreaded test. We arrived in Maebashi around 10 am and first had to get my US license translated into Japanese which costed about 4,000 yen. We had a little time to kill around lunch time before we were to go to the testing facility, so we got lunch and went to Tower Records where I bought Seikima II greatest hits CD haha. Then after that we had to go to the testing facility and fill out a shit ton of paperwork and wait for several hours. Finally it was time to take the written test. This was probably the easiest shit ever. They gave us 15 minutes to answer 10 true or false questions about traffic rules, I finished in like a minute and a half and got them all right. This one dude failed because he didnt understand any language that they offered the test in so he tried in English but obviously didnt understand. Everyone else who passed then were taken to the driving test course. There were 20 foreigners there to take the test, most of them had tried before and failed. I was the last person to go so I had to wait for a while. Every single person seemed pretty disapointed but not very surprised as they left the car and already knew that they most likely didnt pass. If you make the smallest mistake you will fail the test. Someone failed the test for not looking underneath the car before getting inside to check for small animals and other hazards. They expect you to make over exadurated movements when checking the mirrors or else they wont notice. You have to drive a certain set distance from the side of the lane and you have to stop exactly at the line when you stop for a light or stop sign. In really doesnt test your ability to drive at all, it simply tests your ability to do exactly what they want under preassure. If everyone drove like they expect you to in the test it would probably CAUSE accidents. The test was going ok at first for me but towards the end I was checking my mirrors and around my shoulder so often that the instructor said I wasnt looking forward enough and it was dangerous. Everyone who took the test stressed how much you should constantly look around, I suppose I over did it. The course itself isnt even hard, its just how increadibly strict they are. Ive even heard of people who did it perfect but were failed anyway just cuz the instructor didnt feel like passing them. After everyone took the test, we sat around a while and waited for the results. Out of 20 people, only 5 passed. No one who took the test for the first time that day passed. One dude who failed the test told me that it was his 17th try... talk about fucking rediculous! I scheduled to take the test again next month. I think I know exactly what I did wrong so hopefully I can pass next time. Every time I want to take the test it costs me like an additional 3,000-4,000 yen or something. One of the worst things about all of this is most other major countries can just legally drive for as long as they want in Japan without a Japanese license INCLUDING CANADA and really... lets be honest, driving in the US and Canada is the same fuckin shit. bummer...
After that we drove back to my town and didnt get back until around 7:30. One of my schools (Fujiwara) was having an Enkai that night and I was already an hour late. When I finally got there it was all good though. It turns out about half the teachers will teach at new schools next semester so I will have to get to know a lot of new teachers, which sucks because I actually like everyone at Fujiwara. I stuck to beer the whole night and while I got nice and drunk, fortunately the next day my head felt fine.
I woke up Saturday morning and took the train to Akihabara where I spent the entire day playing casuals. There was were no tournaments so there were a lot of people there playing casuals. They only had 7 cabinets now since they got some Arcana Heart 2 cabs in which are taking up the space. I dont know if its temporary or not but hopefully they will put back some of the AC cabs soon (while still keeping the AH2 cabs). Not very many people were playing Arcana though, I didnt try it out since I have no idea how to play the game, still have never even touched the first one yet. FAB and Ogawa were playing on 2 cabs next to eachother for a while and both of them racked up a win streak of about 3o wins each or so. I played against both of them a couple times, and while I constantly came close I couldnt get that last round in. However, I eventually did beat FAB and ended his win streak. Ogawa just got tired of playing and got off the machine undefeated. Afterwords he came up to me and was trying to give me some advice because I came very close. Throughout the day I kept getting smaller streaks of around 10 or 11 wins with some losses here and there but I played well for the most part. I played from about 2 pm to around 11:30 pm non stop except for a 20 minute break to get some curry. When it started to get dead I headed for Shinjuku to go to Current.
Current was pretty awsome, lots of regulars there. There were also some dudes from Finland on vacation that I talked to for a bit. I also got to visit with an old friend who I havnt had the chance to see in a while who I wasnt expecting to see anytime soon. It was nice to spend a little time with my old friend again. I was having a good night and didnt feel like going to sleep right away after Current closed so I went to PSY till 6 am and then finally went to sleep.
The next day was the Alpha Station tournament in Shin Okubo which is right next to Shinjuku. I stopped by Club Sega to talk to MIU for a little bit first. I told him about the unofficial tourny we will throw and how its gonna be really big so I told him to tell lots of people to come, though I have no idea who will come. I also told him how I have no SBO team now and asked if he knew anyone who needs a partner but he said no. His team is only going to be able to play at one qualifier since MIU has to work so often as it is. After I was done talking with MIU I took a nice walk over to Alpha Station. The weather was fantastic. It had been a while since ive been to Alpha Station, the last time I went was the first night I discovered Current. When I got there, they had 5 AC cabs going and lots of people were plaing pre tournament casuals. I thought it was gonna be a singles tournament but it turned out to be a 3 on 3. Luckely Gin was there and he was teaming up with a Robo Ky player who said he went by the handle China. I have no idea why he calls himself China (seeing as how hes not Chinese) but I think its short for something else. They needed a 3rd so he offered to let me be on their team. I was down with it so I joined. There were about 30 people who entered the tournament so there were 10 teams divided into 3 round robin pools. Our pool was the biggest pool with 4 teams and was also the hardest pool. They put all the best teams in our pool. One of the teams was the all ladies team consisting of the hot Zappa player, the really strong pink Slayer player who I see often, and the female Dizzy player who won the all girls tournament before and was at the Vegas tournament a few weeks ago, I think shes probably the best female player in Tokyo. One of the other teams had Inoue (HOS) on it and this really beastly Potemkin player and some other Dizzy. There was also a 2 man team of Slayer and Faust. I dont know most of the players names since they didnt have the invividual names posted on the brackets, just the team names. Our first match was against the 2 man team of Slayer and Faust. I decided I would try first. They put their Slayer player first. This guy was pretty much just in the zone because he defeated me and then proceeded to OCV my whole team. Up next we had to fight the ladies team. This time China went first with his Robo-Ky. Up first was pink Slayer. China beat her. Then he fought against hot Zappa and won. Finally he went up against the Dizzy player but he got beat down kinda hard. I said I would go next. I played pretty solid and won both rounds, my team mates were pleased. Finally we had to face Inoue's team. This time Gin went first against Inoue and lost. I decided to go next. The first round I was losing but then I made this really awsome comeback and threw him out of a gunblaze. However, the 2nd round he spammed a bunch of high level gunblazes like 50939 times in a row and while I am ussually good about blocking those, I eventually got hit and lost the round. 3rd round was decent but I ended up losing. Finally China went but he also fell to Inoue resulting in us getting OCVd. So we ended up not winning our pool. Inoue's team went on to win the whole tournament. This tournament was a fucking Slayer and Potemking fest, there were like 4 of each in the tournament. I stayed and played casuals for several hours after the tournament and got a 17 win streak. I eventually lost to a solid Sol player in a close match, I rematched him right away and beat him. Then I stayed on the machine for a few more games and it was eventually time to leave so I just got up and left.
I still have no idea who I will team up with for SBO. Theres a slight chance I may team up with Gin but I really dont know yet. Hopefully I will figure something out. This will be my last blog update for a few weeks. Next weekend I will go to Tokyo first and go to the X-Japan show followed by a tournament at Club Sega Shinjuku the next day. I will then spend the next whole week in Osaka/Kyoto and finally play in the first SBO qualifier in Tokyo that next Sunday. Expect an epic and long blog update in a few weeks!
Monday, March 24, 2008
Monday, March 17, 2008
Victory at Game Chariot!
This week I was able to leave work at the usual time so I headed for Akihabara for casuals. Nemo came up to me and said hi and then played me for a few matches, I lost. His Testament is seriously getting way better, pretty soon hes gonna be rivaling Shounen. Ogawa was there too, I played him once and lost. In general though I did well against most other people, had a few smaller win streaks like 11 wins or something. After it started to die down I headed for Shinjuku.
I arrived at Current fairly late, maybe around 1 am. The place was pretty dead, only a few people from Cirque de Soleil were there. I had 2 beers and then decided that I wanted to try somewhere else so after talking with Mogi and Sushi for a bit I headed over to GODZ. Unfortunetly GODZ was even worse with a grand total of 2 people besides me in the whole bar, one of them being the owner haha. As soon as I walked in they threw on a bunch of Symphony X cuz they know its my favorite so I stayed for one beer and talked with them briefly. After that I figured I would give PSY a try. Fortunately PSY was much better off and was fairly packed (about as packed as it can get seeing as how its very small). Heidi (Masami's friend from Norway) was there. I sat next to her and we talked for a few hours about various things. I lost track of time and it was already 5:30 so I said bye and went to sleep at the usual spot. I didnt wanna stay up later because I would be going to a tournament in Chiba at Game Chariot the next day.
As soon as I woke up I headed straight for the train station. It took about an hour and a half due to the train schedule sucking once you get far into Chiba but eventually I made it to Game Chariot. I didnt write the start time for the tournament down in my planner book so I wasnt sure if I was gonna make it on time but luckely I got there 45 mins before the tournament started. It was a 3 on 3 team tournament so I just signed up alone and they later paired me with2 other people. I began to play some casuals and had about 8 wins and then I eventually lost in a close match to an ABA player that I had beaten before who rematched me. Then I got on another machine and played against another Faust player and beat him. He then came up to me and shook my hand saying my Faust was good and that we are on the same team. Turns out they allowed same characters on the same team. Our other team mate turned out to be the ABA player. The Faust was named Ojima and the ABA was named Reo. The tournament had 18 people enter so there were 6 teams. Everyone in the tournament seemed to be local Chiba players, I guess not a lot of Tokyo players felt like traveling so far since this wasnt a major or anything. They divided the tournament into 2 round robin pools and the finals would be the winner of each pool. We were in pool B. I watched all the matches in pool A and the winning team was DI, ED, and KY. Then it was our turn to start our pool. We went first against a team of KY SL and MA. I went first for my team. The Ky player won the first round. The 2nd round I was losing but I told myself to not lose cuz I knew I could totally beat this guy so I just played super patient and after a long time of full screen fireball dodging and item throwing I eventually closed my way in and came back to take the 2nd round. I then proceeded to win the 3rd round. Up next was SL. This guy had a pretty good Slayer but not good enough so I beat him too. Finally I was to play MA and since I hate fighting May I was a bit weary but I just played the matchup as best I could and actually won both rounds, resulting in an OCV. Up next we were to fight a team of AX SO and KY. This time Ojima wanted to go first, they told me to go last cuz they wanted a chance to play haha. Ojima actually ended up OCVing this team resulting in our teams 2nd OCV. Then it was the other 2 teams turn to fight eachother and the KY player from the first team we fought OCVed the 2nd team. The finals were now to be our team vs DI, ED, KY. We won RPS so they selected DI first. I told them I could handle Dizzy so they said it was ok to go first. I beat Dizzy 2-0. Up next was Eddie. I was winning the 1st round and then he came back with a pixel and I lost. I then proceeded to win the 2nd and 3rd rounds. Final match was me vs KY. I beat him 2-0 and the tournament came to and end resulting in our teams 3rd OCV. So our team OCVed our way through the tournament with a perfect showing and our poor ABA player didnt even get to play at all. After the tournament I stayed for a bit and played a lot of casuals, winning about 95% of my matches. Ojima was talking with me about Faust strats and asked to exchange email so we could talk again sometime. Eventually Ojima and Ryokun left. Shortly after I left as well since it was getting dead.
I waited for the train for a while but it eventually showed up. Then I arrived at Chiba station and when I was transfering trains I randomly ran into my team again. I took the opportunity to take a victory photo of us together that I will upload later. I said goodbye and then proceeded to head back to Tokyo. I arrived in Akhabara and stayed for more casuals. Ogawa was there again with a few other various good players and the place was packed. I later recieved an email from my friend Liz. She went to another concert in Tokyo again so she wanted to know if I wanted to go drinking with her for a bit. This time she had a hotel room though so she needed to take the last train back. I told her id meet her at 10:30 at Shinjuku station. I left Akihabara around 10 and was on time to meet Liz. This time she didnt get lost which was great.
We walked to Current and drank for about an hour and a half and then she had to go. This time the bar was pretty full. Eventually this older woman came up to me and was totally hitting on me. She asked how old I was and I told her and then she said she was 40. Then she like asked me the same question again like 10 mins later, it became pretty appearant that this chick was already drunk and probly had a lot of drinks before coming here. This was later confirmed when she proceeded to ask my age a 3rd time... Then she like went back to talk with one of the people she came with and then I noticed out of the corner of my eye that she was dancing by herself behind me and sorta seemed like she was trying to get my attention. I just ignored her cuz I wasnt realy interseted in dancing with some wasted 40 year old chick. Eventually she left with her group, I cant say I was saddened by it. Eventually after a while Chip showed up with Sawa. We hung out and talked for the rest of the night. They were asking why Liz wasnt here and I told them she already had to leave. They were dissapointed. At one point a huge group of like 13 people come rolling in and sit in the tables at the back. Eventually I guess one of the guys was wasted or getting roudy because they turned the music off and turned the lights on and pretty much kicked the guy out of the bar and made all his friends leave with him. I realy honestly have no idea what happened but I guess he was harassing someone else in a different group of people. The other group of people left too cuz I guess it sorta ruined their night. In any case I didnt really noticed what happened cuz I was at the bar but after they left they turned the music back on. This was the first time ive seen this happen. I onced asked Sushi and he told me that out of the 7 or so years that Current has been around, there has never been a fight inside the bar which is nice to know. Eventually it was closing time so I said goodbye to everyone and stumbled back to the Manga cafe. I was pretty wasted since I was drinking since like 10:30 and had more beer than I usually do.
The next morning I woke up with a slight hangover, the head was hurting kinda bad. After taking a few headache pills I felt better. I decided to head over to Club Sega Shinjuku to visit MIU and see how he was doing. He was surprised to see me there since there was no events going on. I talked with him about various things. I asked him who his SBO team was and he said some testament and baiken players but I forgot their names. I asked him if he knew where to find the tournament schedule for the qualifiers and he told me it was in this months Arcadia. He showed me what page it was on, I didnt notice it when I briefly skimmed the magazine when I first got it. I also asked him what his opinions on BlazBlue and SFIV were. He thinks BlazBlue is gonna be a good game and he says right now SFIV just seems sorta average. I also asked him if he heard the news about GGAC not being a main event at evo. He says he still plans to go and he said that some other Japanese players will still go like MINT and Yosaan. This may be a good reason to still throw a good side tournament. After a while I said bye and headed for Akihabara to spend the rest of the day playing casuals.
Various top players were there. I beat Zero and Osaka B. I played Ogawa a few times and I played 012 but I lost. Basara was there too. He said that now due to the fact that hes not sure about his schedule after 4/20 he is not sure what is going to happen with SBO quals so he decided to break up the team. I honestly have no idea if this is the real reason or not but the bottom line is were not teaming up anymore it seems. Since HH hasnt responded to my email yet I am currently without a team. After a while it was getting late and I was tired as hell and didnt feel like playing anymore so I had no problem going home. I dont know what I am gonna do for my SBO team now, I guess ill just have to see what happens. Next weekend theres a tournament at Alpha Station near Shin Okubo. Ill be sure to go to that one as well.
I arrived at Current fairly late, maybe around 1 am. The place was pretty dead, only a few people from Cirque de Soleil were there. I had 2 beers and then decided that I wanted to try somewhere else so after talking with Mogi and Sushi for a bit I headed over to GODZ. Unfortunetly GODZ was even worse with a grand total of 2 people besides me in the whole bar, one of them being the owner haha. As soon as I walked in they threw on a bunch of Symphony X cuz they know its my favorite so I stayed for one beer and talked with them briefly. After that I figured I would give PSY a try. Fortunately PSY was much better off and was fairly packed (about as packed as it can get seeing as how its very small). Heidi (Masami's friend from Norway) was there. I sat next to her and we talked for a few hours about various things. I lost track of time and it was already 5:30 so I said bye and went to sleep at the usual spot. I didnt wanna stay up later because I would be going to a tournament in Chiba at Game Chariot the next day.
As soon as I woke up I headed straight for the train station. It took about an hour and a half due to the train schedule sucking once you get far into Chiba but eventually I made it to Game Chariot. I didnt write the start time for the tournament down in my planner book so I wasnt sure if I was gonna make it on time but luckely I got there 45 mins before the tournament started. It was a 3 on 3 team tournament so I just signed up alone and they later paired me with2 other people. I began to play some casuals and had about 8 wins and then I eventually lost in a close match to an ABA player that I had beaten before who rematched me. Then I got on another machine and played against another Faust player and beat him. He then came up to me and shook my hand saying my Faust was good and that we are on the same team. Turns out they allowed same characters on the same team. Our other team mate turned out to be the ABA player. The Faust was named Ojima and the ABA was named Reo. The tournament had 18 people enter so there were 6 teams. Everyone in the tournament seemed to be local Chiba players, I guess not a lot of Tokyo players felt like traveling so far since this wasnt a major or anything. They divided the tournament into 2 round robin pools and the finals would be the winner of each pool. We were in pool B. I watched all the matches in pool A and the winning team was DI, ED, and KY. Then it was our turn to start our pool. We went first against a team of KY SL and MA. I went first for my team. The Ky player won the first round. The 2nd round I was losing but I told myself to not lose cuz I knew I could totally beat this guy so I just played super patient and after a long time of full screen fireball dodging and item throwing I eventually closed my way in and came back to take the 2nd round. I then proceeded to win the 3rd round. Up next was SL. This guy had a pretty good Slayer but not good enough so I beat him too. Finally I was to play MA and since I hate fighting May I was a bit weary but I just played the matchup as best I could and actually won both rounds, resulting in an OCV. Up next we were to fight a team of AX SO and KY. This time Ojima wanted to go first, they told me to go last cuz they wanted a chance to play haha. Ojima actually ended up OCVing this team resulting in our teams 2nd OCV. Then it was the other 2 teams turn to fight eachother and the KY player from the first team we fought OCVed the 2nd team. The finals were now to be our team vs DI, ED, KY. We won RPS so they selected DI first. I told them I could handle Dizzy so they said it was ok to go first. I beat Dizzy 2-0. Up next was Eddie. I was winning the 1st round and then he came back with a pixel and I lost. I then proceeded to win the 2nd and 3rd rounds. Final match was me vs KY. I beat him 2-0 and the tournament came to and end resulting in our teams 3rd OCV. So our team OCVed our way through the tournament with a perfect showing and our poor ABA player didnt even get to play at all. After the tournament I stayed for a bit and played a lot of casuals, winning about 95% of my matches. Ojima was talking with me about Faust strats and asked to exchange email so we could talk again sometime. Eventually Ojima and Ryokun left. Shortly after I left as well since it was getting dead.
I waited for the train for a while but it eventually showed up. Then I arrived at Chiba station and when I was transfering trains I randomly ran into my team again. I took the opportunity to take a victory photo of us together that I will upload later. I said goodbye and then proceeded to head back to Tokyo. I arrived in Akhabara and stayed for more casuals. Ogawa was there again with a few other various good players and the place was packed. I later recieved an email from my friend Liz. She went to another concert in Tokyo again so she wanted to know if I wanted to go drinking with her for a bit. This time she had a hotel room though so she needed to take the last train back. I told her id meet her at 10:30 at Shinjuku station. I left Akihabara around 10 and was on time to meet Liz. This time she didnt get lost which was great.
We walked to Current and drank for about an hour and a half and then she had to go. This time the bar was pretty full. Eventually this older woman came up to me and was totally hitting on me. She asked how old I was and I told her and then she said she was 40. Then she like asked me the same question again like 10 mins later, it became pretty appearant that this chick was already drunk and probly had a lot of drinks before coming here. This was later confirmed when she proceeded to ask my age a 3rd time... Then she like went back to talk with one of the people she came with and then I noticed out of the corner of my eye that she was dancing by herself behind me and sorta seemed like she was trying to get my attention. I just ignored her cuz I wasnt realy interseted in dancing with some wasted 40 year old chick. Eventually she left with her group, I cant say I was saddened by it. Eventually after a while Chip showed up with Sawa. We hung out and talked for the rest of the night. They were asking why Liz wasnt here and I told them she already had to leave. They were dissapointed. At one point a huge group of like 13 people come rolling in and sit in the tables at the back. Eventually I guess one of the guys was wasted or getting roudy because they turned the music off and turned the lights on and pretty much kicked the guy out of the bar and made all his friends leave with him. I realy honestly have no idea what happened but I guess he was harassing someone else in a different group of people. The other group of people left too cuz I guess it sorta ruined their night. In any case I didnt really noticed what happened cuz I was at the bar but after they left they turned the music back on. This was the first time ive seen this happen. I onced asked Sushi and he told me that out of the 7 or so years that Current has been around, there has never been a fight inside the bar which is nice to know. Eventually it was closing time so I said goodbye to everyone and stumbled back to the Manga cafe. I was pretty wasted since I was drinking since like 10:30 and had more beer than I usually do.
The next morning I woke up with a slight hangover, the head was hurting kinda bad. After taking a few headache pills I felt better. I decided to head over to Club Sega Shinjuku to visit MIU and see how he was doing. He was surprised to see me there since there was no events going on. I talked with him about various things. I asked him who his SBO team was and he said some testament and baiken players but I forgot their names. I asked him if he knew where to find the tournament schedule for the qualifiers and he told me it was in this months Arcadia. He showed me what page it was on, I didnt notice it when I briefly skimmed the magazine when I first got it. I also asked him what his opinions on BlazBlue and SFIV were. He thinks BlazBlue is gonna be a good game and he says right now SFIV just seems sorta average. I also asked him if he heard the news about GGAC not being a main event at evo. He says he still plans to go and he said that some other Japanese players will still go like MINT and Yosaan. This may be a good reason to still throw a good side tournament. After a while I said bye and headed for Akihabara to spend the rest of the day playing casuals.
Various top players were there. I beat Zero and Osaka B. I played Ogawa a few times and I played 012 but I lost. Basara was there too. He said that now due to the fact that hes not sure about his schedule after 4/20 he is not sure what is going to happen with SBO quals so he decided to break up the team. I honestly have no idea if this is the real reason or not but the bottom line is were not teaming up anymore it seems. Since HH hasnt responded to my email yet I am currently without a team. After a while it was getting late and I was tired as hell and didnt feel like playing anymore so I had no problem going home. I dont know what I am gonna do for my SBO team now, I guess ill just have to see what happens. Next weekend theres a tournament at Alpha Station near Shin Okubo. Ill be sure to go to that one as well.
Tuesday, March 11, 2008
No One Came
This one starts out as usual. I took the train after work to Akihabara and played casuals like I always do. I saw Basara there among some other top players like Ogawa. I asked Basara when the first qualifier for SBO will be. He says it will be in Tokyo in Nakano at TRF game center on 4/6. However, he said that he and Domi will not be able to enter that qualifier due to Domi having other business to attend to. As far as I can tell they still plan to team up with me for future tournaments but im not sure. I played for a bit and got a few small streaks. Didnt get around to playing Ogawa or anything. Eventually it started to die so I went to Shinjuku. The night at Current was pretty typical with nothing really noteworthy to mention.
The next day there was a tournament schedule at Las Vegas in Shinjuku which is conveniently located across the street from where I sleep. I woke up, got some food, and started playing casuals. There was a good Zappa player sitting at the cab next to me. I had played him before at Akihabara last weekend and went back and forth with him. He had a nice win streak so I asked him if he wanted to team up with me. At first he said he wasnt sure yet. Eventually I guess he must have been watching me play and saw me beat some good people so he said he would team up with me after all. His handle is Mitsurugi. This was a 2 on 2 tournament so all that was left now was to wait till it started. We signed up under the name the Dr/patient team since its Faust and Zappa. After signups it ended up as being a round robin tourny with 2 pools of 5 teams with the top 2 teams playing in the finals. Our first match was against a team of 2 Sol players (they allowed same character teams). These Sols were both extremely unorthadox and just played very off the wall and non conventional. You can tell they were friends and played together often because they pretty much used a lot of the same tricks. Lots of stuff dealing with momentum from FRCd special moves involving mobility tactics and extended dust loop type stuff. I went first and my match was very close but I lost. I had beat both of the Sols in casuals before the tourny but then I lost to one of them right before the tourny started. Mitsurugi went next and managed to beat both Sols. Up next we had to fight a team of 2 girls. One was the Dizzy player who won the all girls tournament that I accidently went to about a month ago. The other was this really hot Zappa player who I often see around. I went first against Dizzy and lost in a close game. Mitsurugi proceeded to beat both of them. Up next was a team of Pochio (Slayer) and Abagen (Po). I went first vs Slayer. I won the first round but lost the 2nd round. The 3rd round started with Slayer doing a gold burst which hit me and he got full meter. I wasnt expecting this at all and no one really ever uses this strategy but it worked well since Slayer with a full bar has so much potential to just rape you in the ass. I ended up losing. Unfortunately Mitsurugi also lost to Slayer but im not surprised given how bad a mathup that is for Zappa. The last match of our pool was vs a duel Dizzy team. One was a girl and I think she was the girlfriend of the other guy on the team. I went first against the girl and beat her pretty easily. Then I lost in a very close match to the other guy. Mitsurugi also lost to he male Dizzy. With our record at 2 and 2, we didnt advance out of our pool. In the end the Abagen/Pochio team won the whole tournament. I didnt feel like I played exceptional in the tournament matches and was doing much better in casuals after the tourny. I stayed and played for several hours and managed to beat everyone I lost to in the tournament but it was too little too late. I was determined to do better at the Game Newton singles tournament that was schedule for the next day. Gin was there and had also played in the tournament with a Potemkin player but was in the other pool. I played against him in casuals and was beating him pretty hard. He went out of his way tot tell me that ive gotten a lot better since last time we played. He still has no team for SBO so I could team with him most likely if it comes down to it but I dunno. After the tournament a lot more top players just randomly showed up like Zero and H.H. among others. I asked H.H. who his SBO team was out of curiosity and he said he didnt have one yet. I told him that Basara and Domi is most likely going to be my team but that theres a chance they may not be able to make it to a lot of tournaments. I asked H.H. if he would like to team up with me if they cant play. He said he would be willing to do it so we exchanged email. I played him about 3 times and beat him one, the other 2 games were extremely close. One of the unorthadox Sol players managed to beat H.H. too. I ended the night with playing a shit ton of games vs one of the Sols and went back and forth with him. Then I got a message from my friend Liz.
Liz was around since she had gone to a concert in Saitama. She had to return back to her home fairly early on Sunday morning so she wouldnt be able to get a hotel room and sleep late so she decided she wanted to go drinking with me all night and just take the first train home. She emailed me when she arrived at Shinjuku station and I went to go find her. She got lost a hell and after lots of email tag and wondering around I told her to just stay put and eventually found her. Once I found her though everything was cool. We stopped at First Kitchen and got some food. I had a fish sandwich and a beer.
We then walked to Current. We stayed and drank there for a few hours. Eventually Chip showed up with a friend of his named Sawa. She is a friend of his from back in Osaka. She spoke perfect English and had a British accent since she studied in the UK. The 4 of us eventually went to Gravity. The dudes who work there were excited to see me since it had been a while. Right away they were asking me to sing songs on the mic while they played them on guitar. I figured why not. They asked me to sing a song by some and ive never heard before and I didnt know how it went so it wasnt so great. The next 2 songs I sang were Bark at the Moon by Ozzy and Rock and Roll by Zeppelin. I did good on both of those and Sawa complimented me on my singing (even though I think its pretty mediocre at best). After that we went back to Current for one more beer and then they closed. The first train back to Gunma didnt leave until after 6 so Liz had time to kill. I took her to PSY for some more drinking since they are open till 6. Nothing to eventfull happened there, we just had more drinks and talked about various things. Eventually they closed so I walked her near the station so she wouldnt get lost and went back to the Manga kissa for sleep.
The next day I woke up with some time to kill since the Tournament at Game Newton wasnt scheduled to start till 5. I went to Shinjuku station and stood in line to buy some overnight bus tickets for my spring break trip to Kansai. I was able to get roundtrip tickets for just under 10,000 yen, which is like 1/4 the price of a roundtrip shinkansen ticket. I will leave from Shinjuku and arrive in Osaka. Since the first SBO qual is the last weekend of spring break on Sunday I will leave Osaka Saturday night and return on Sunday morning. After buying the tickets I headed over to Oyama for the Game Newton tournament. I wanted to get there early so I could get lots of casuals in to warm up. Much to my dismay, when I arrived there were only 3 people in the whole arcade. One was the guy who worked there who seemed to be doing repair work on the main cab that would be used for the tourny. There was also some random guy just playing some Gundam game alone. The last guy was playing 3S. I had time to kill so I decided to play 3S for like the first time in forever. I was never good at the game to begin with because I never put any real effort into learning it but I almost beat the guy. He was using Q. Then I played him like 2 more times and got owned so I just said fuck it and went for a walk. After a while I returned to the arcade it and was still dead with no one playing GG. I went for another walk and came back. This time there was one guy playing AC against the computer. I got on the cab and played against his Sol, beat him without losing a round. Then he picked Johnny on me 2 times and I beat him both times without losing a round again. Then he gave up and left the arcade. At this point it was 5 minutes after 5:00 and I asked the guy who worked at the arcade what was going on. There was infact a tournament scheduled for today but no one showed up at all. It was kinda depressing and I really have no idea why. Game Newton isnt the biggest arcade and its not in the most convenient location, but I had been there twice before and they had good turnouts. I didnt feel like wasting any more of my day for the slight chance that maybe I could play in a 3 man tournament that would start an hour late so I just left and went back to Shinjuku.
During the time when I was walking around Oyama to kill time, I thought to email the girl who I am buying my X-Japan concert ticket from and ask her what time the show starts and ends, since it occured to me that my overnight bus trip that leaves after the show might be too early. She said it would be cutting it close but said I could get another ticket for Friday instead. I told her to check it out for me. Then I thought about it and if I did that id have to take an extra vacation day so I decided to change my bus ticket to a later time. I changed it to about an hour later and it costed about 3000 yen more but its worth it since the Friday ticket was more expensive anyway. I then told her I changed it and she seemed kinda upset that I didnt wait to tell her first but after a string of emails it seems its going to be fine and I can still go to the Sunday show. I then pretty much just played casuals for like the last 2 hours at Vegas. The hot Zappa chick was there and a few other people but nothing too noteworthy was going on.
On the way home on the train, I got an email from Basara. I had mailed him the day before telling him that if they couldnt team with me I would team with H.H. They said that since they couldnt make the 4/6 tournament to go ahead and team with him. They mentioned nothing about further tournaments but as far as I can tell its still fine to be on their team. I emailed H.H. to tell him about the 4/6 tourny but he still hasnt responded to my email. In addition to that I dont really know who else we will have on our team but I guess it wont be too hard to figure out.
Next week theres a 3 on 3 at Game Chariot in Goi that I will most likely go to. At least people will actually show up to this one. Lets just hope its not some all girls bullshit or posted as the wrong date :P
The next day there was a tournament schedule at Las Vegas in Shinjuku which is conveniently located across the street from where I sleep. I woke up, got some food, and started playing casuals. There was a good Zappa player sitting at the cab next to me. I had played him before at Akihabara last weekend and went back and forth with him. He had a nice win streak so I asked him if he wanted to team up with me. At first he said he wasnt sure yet. Eventually I guess he must have been watching me play and saw me beat some good people so he said he would team up with me after all. His handle is Mitsurugi. This was a 2 on 2 tournament so all that was left now was to wait till it started. We signed up under the name the Dr/patient team since its Faust and Zappa. After signups it ended up as being a round robin tourny with 2 pools of 5 teams with the top 2 teams playing in the finals. Our first match was against a team of 2 Sol players (they allowed same character teams). These Sols were both extremely unorthadox and just played very off the wall and non conventional. You can tell they were friends and played together often because they pretty much used a lot of the same tricks. Lots of stuff dealing with momentum from FRCd special moves involving mobility tactics and extended dust loop type stuff. I went first and my match was very close but I lost. I had beat both of the Sols in casuals before the tourny but then I lost to one of them right before the tourny started. Mitsurugi went next and managed to beat both Sols. Up next we had to fight a team of 2 girls. One was the Dizzy player who won the all girls tournament that I accidently went to about a month ago. The other was this really hot Zappa player who I often see around. I went first against Dizzy and lost in a close game. Mitsurugi proceeded to beat both of them. Up next was a team of Pochio (Slayer) and Abagen (Po). I went first vs Slayer. I won the first round but lost the 2nd round. The 3rd round started with Slayer doing a gold burst which hit me and he got full meter. I wasnt expecting this at all and no one really ever uses this strategy but it worked well since Slayer with a full bar has so much potential to just rape you in the ass. I ended up losing. Unfortunately Mitsurugi also lost to Slayer but im not surprised given how bad a mathup that is for Zappa. The last match of our pool was vs a duel Dizzy team. One was a girl and I think she was the girlfriend of the other guy on the team. I went first against the girl and beat her pretty easily. Then I lost in a very close match to the other guy. Mitsurugi also lost to he male Dizzy. With our record at 2 and 2, we didnt advance out of our pool. In the end the Abagen/Pochio team won the whole tournament. I didnt feel like I played exceptional in the tournament matches and was doing much better in casuals after the tourny. I stayed and played for several hours and managed to beat everyone I lost to in the tournament but it was too little too late. I was determined to do better at the Game Newton singles tournament that was schedule for the next day. Gin was there and had also played in the tournament with a Potemkin player but was in the other pool. I played against him in casuals and was beating him pretty hard. He went out of his way tot tell me that ive gotten a lot better since last time we played. He still has no team for SBO so I could team with him most likely if it comes down to it but I dunno. After the tournament a lot more top players just randomly showed up like Zero and H.H. among others. I asked H.H. who his SBO team was out of curiosity and he said he didnt have one yet. I told him that Basara and Domi is most likely going to be my team but that theres a chance they may not be able to make it to a lot of tournaments. I asked H.H. if he would like to team up with me if they cant play. He said he would be willing to do it so we exchanged email. I played him about 3 times and beat him one, the other 2 games were extremely close. One of the unorthadox Sol players managed to beat H.H. too. I ended the night with playing a shit ton of games vs one of the Sols and went back and forth with him. Then I got a message from my friend Liz.
Liz was around since she had gone to a concert in Saitama. She had to return back to her home fairly early on Sunday morning so she wouldnt be able to get a hotel room and sleep late so she decided she wanted to go drinking with me all night and just take the first train home. She emailed me when she arrived at Shinjuku station and I went to go find her. She got lost a hell and after lots of email tag and wondering around I told her to just stay put and eventually found her. Once I found her though everything was cool. We stopped at First Kitchen and got some food. I had a fish sandwich and a beer.
We then walked to Current. We stayed and drank there for a few hours. Eventually Chip showed up with a friend of his named Sawa. She is a friend of his from back in Osaka. She spoke perfect English and had a British accent since she studied in the UK. The 4 of us eventually went to Gravity. The dudes who work there were excited to see me since it had been a while. Right away they were asking me to sing songs on the mic while they played them on guitar. I figured why not. They asked me to sing a song by some and ive never heard before and I didnt know how it went so it wasnt so great. The next 2 songs I sang were Bark at the Moon by Ozzy and Rock and Roll by Zeppelin. I did good on both of those and Sawa complimented me on my singing (even though I think its pretty mediocre at best). After that we went back to Current for one more beer and then they closed. The first train back to Gunma didnt leave until after 6 so Liz had time to kill. I took her to PSY for some more drinking since they are open till 6. Nothing to eventfull happened there, we just had more drinks and talked about various things. Eventually they closed so I walked her near the station so she wouldnt get lost and went back to the Manga kissa for sleep.
The next day I woke up with some time to kill since the Tournament at Game Newton wasnt scheduled to start till 5. I went to Shinjuku station and stood in line to buy some overnight bus tickets for my spring break trip to Kansai. I was able to get roundtrip tickets for just under 10,000 yen, which is like 1/4 the price of a roundtrip shinkansen ticket. I will leave from Shinjuku and arrive in Osaka. Since the first SBO qual is the last weekend of spring break on Sunday I will leave Osaka Saturday night and return on Sunday morning. After buying the tickets I headed over to Oyama for the Game Newton tournament. I wanted to get there early so I could get lots of casuals in to warm up. Much to my dismay, when I arrived there were only 3 people in the whole arcade. One was the guy who worked there who seemed to be doing repair work on the main cab that would be used for the tourny. There was also some random guy just playing some Gundam game alone. The last guy was playing 3S. I had time to kill so I decided to play 3S for like the first time in forever. I was never good at the game to begin with because I never put any real effort into learning it but I almost beat the guy. He was using Q. Then I played him like 2 more times and got owned so I just said fuck it and went for a walk. After a while I returned to the arcade it and was still dead with no one playing GG. I went for another walk and came back. This time there was one guy playing AC against the computer. I got on the cab and played against his Sol, beat him without losing a round. Then he picked Johnny on me 2 times and I beat him both times without losing a round again. Then he gave up and left the arcade. At this point it was 5 minutes after 5:00 and I asked the guy who worked at the arcade what was going on. There was infact a tournament scheduled for today but no one showed up at all. It was kinda depressing and I really have no idea why. Game Newton isnt the biggest arcade and its not in the most convenient location, but I had been there twice before and they had good turnouts. I didnt feel like wasting any more of my day for the slight chance that maybe I could play in a 3 man tournament that would start an hour late so I just left and went back to Shinjuku.
During the time when I was walking around Oyama to kill time, I thought to email the girl who I am buying my X-Japan concert ticket from and ask her what time the show starts and ends, since it occured to me that my overnight bus trip that leaves after the show might be too early. She said it would be cutting it close but said I could get another ticket for Friday instead. I told her to check it out for me. Then I thought about it and if I did that id have to take an extra vacation day so I decided to change my bus ticket to a later time. I changed it to about an hour later and it costed about 3000 yen more but its worth it since the Friday ticket was more expensive anyway. I then told her I changed it and she seemed kinda upset that I didnt wait to tell her first but after a string of emails it seems its going to be fine and I can still go to the Sunday show. I then pretty much just played casuals for like the last 2 hours at Vegas. The hot Zappa chick was there and a few other people but nothing too noteworthy was going on.
On the way home on the train, I got an email from Basara. I had mailed him the day before telling him that if they couldnt team with me I would team with H.H. They said that since they couldnt make the 4/6 tournament to go ahead and team with him. They mentioned nothing about further tournaments but as far as I can tell its still fine to be on their team. I emailed H.H. to tell him about the 4/6 tourny but he still hasnt responded to my email. In addition to that I dont really know who else we will have on our team but I guess it wont be too hard to figure out.
Next week theres a 3 on 3 at Game Chariot in Goi that I will most likely go to. At least people will actually show up to this one. Lets just hope its not some all girls bullshit or posted as the wrong date :P
Tuesday, March 4, 2008
alcohol > snow
Im gonna take this one back a little bit and start in the middle of the week. On Wednesday night I was driving my girlfriend home and we ended up driving through a fucking blizzard. I could hardly see at all because the snow was so heavy and thick and I constantly had to stop the car and get out to clean off my headlights because the snow I was driving through kept completely covering them and I could hardly see. After driving for a long time like some kinda senile old man I finally managed to drive her home. On the way back it was just as bad, but to make matters worse I realized that my gas tank was well past the E mark. This instantly brought back horrid memories of the last time I went to Nebraska with team Chicago and we ran out of gas in the middle of no where. The last thing I wanted to do was run out of gas in a blizzard, but I didnt really have much choice but to keep driving since there were no gas stations open at this hour in my tiny fucking town. Eventually I finally actually made it home somehow and I just sorta parked my car sorta halfass in front of my apartment.
The next morning (Thursday) I woke up to find my car completely burried in snow up to the windshield and considering I had no gas at all basically, I didnt even think about driving to work. I put on my snow pants and walked to work through the thick snow. When I arrived, all of the teachers and many of the students were out front shoveling out the front lot so people could park their cars. I grabbed a shovel and helped dig for a while and we ended up digging well into 1st period. Eventually it was enough and everyone could get their cars in. I walked home and when I returned home I was happy to see that the town did a nice job of clearing out the parking lot in front of my apartment and unburied my car. I had made plans to go skiing with Ryoko (my girlfriend) that evening so after work I changed my clothes and headed out. I was pretty nervous on the way to the gas station that I would break down but luckely I made it there... and I really have no idea how I did considering how long my car was well past Empty.
I picked her up and she told me that she realized that she had lost her cellphone at some point between last night and now. I called her phone to see if it was somewhere in my car but there was no ring. I told her we could check my place later. We enjoyed skiing for 4 hours at a place like only 10 mins drive from my apartment. Afterwords our bodies were both pretty tired and we were both pretty hungry. It was already about 10:30 at night at this point but we went back to my place to have some dinner. When we arrived at my apartment Ryoko suggested that I tried calling her phone again in front of my apartment building in the parking lot. Much to my surprise, this time we heard the phone ring in the distance. We headed towards the sound and it lead us to the general area of a pile of snow along side a fence that was about almost as tall as me that went out about 7 feet from the fence and stretched along side it for maybe 3o feet. The phone must have fallen out of her purse when we were getting in my car to go home Wednesday night during the blizzard and got plowed into the big snow pile when they cleaned out the parking lot. We were happy to hear the phone ring but then were suddenly filled with a sense of despair as we then heard the sound of her phones battery dying. As a result I couldnt keep calling her phone to confirm the location so we had a rough idea as to where it was but certainly not very exact. I turned on my car again so that we could use the headlights to see and I grabbed a shovel and started digging. I gave her another shovel that I had in my car but was unfortunately pretty weak so it didnt do much good. I probably dug in the snow for around 45 minutes. My body was already aching from the skiing all day and all the digging earlier but I kept trying. Eventually after 45 mins she told me to just give up. I had already dug up a section of the giant snow pile all the way to the fence and theres no way of telling if I had simply completely missed the phone or if I had already dug it out and re buried it without being able to see it. I didnt want to give up because I felt bad knowing that the phone was somewhere there and all of her contact information for people she knows was stored in her phone and she didnt have most of the info anywhere else. It seriously felt like looking for a needle in a haystack (at the risk of sounding cliche) or digging for some buried treasure when you dont know where the fucking X is... except pirates got to dig for treasure on a tropical island while drunk on fine rum... I was sober and freezing. I told her sorry and that I felt bad for not finding it but she was happy that I at least tried (though I still feel bad). I made us some spaghetti and then drove her home since it was already really late and we both had work in the morning.
The next day (Friday) I went to school and it was more or less a regular day... until 6th period. Many of the student's parents came to watch their classes and we had several of them come watch our 6th period English class. It was no big deal to me and I didnt mind. However.... the parents stayed after 6th period and had a meeting with some of the teachers. When 4:15 rolled around I got ready to leave the school and head home to get my stuff and drive to the train station just to catch the 5 pm train as I always do. Unfortunately, when I went outside to go to my car I found that doing so was impossable. Due to the fact that our school isnt very big and to all the snow, the parents had to just pile their cars in anywhere that they could find room. This meant that my car was now blocked by about 10 or so parents cars and I had no way to go home until their meetings were over. I sat around and waited, hoping that they would leave soon. After much time eventually I got out of there a little after 6 pm. I knew that by the time I got to Tokyo it was going to be almost 10 pm so I figured going to Akihabara to play casuals was more or less pointless since sometimes people start to clear out of there as early as 10:30 or 11. Knowing this I figured I would make the most of the situation so I decided I would get nice a drunk. Before getting on the train I bought a bottle of Suntory whiskey from 7-11. I slept for an hour on the train and then after I transfered trains at Takasaki I spent the next 2 hours on the train, drinking whiskey and chasing it with cola, and playing Final Fantasy V on my DS. I had to get off at Akabane to transfer again since I was heading straight to Shinjuku this time. I used the opportunity to buy the latest Arcadia from the bookstore at the station since I didnt know the tournament schedule for the weekend yet. Much to my dissapointment, there were no tournaments scheduled anywhere in Tokyo, Chiba, or Saitama for the entire weekend. I recieved an email from my friend Liz while I was on the train. Liz is also an ALT and lives in the city of Numata which is next to where I live. She said that there was a concert of this Japanese band that she likes called Quaff and they were playing in Tokyo at Takadanobaba on Saturday evening. She asked if I would go with her. Finding out that there were no tournaments afterall I told her I would go with her and to reserve me a ticket.
By the time I finally arrived in Shinjuku I had finished the entire bottle of whiskey and was feeling pretty good. It was about 10 pm and even though I was pretty buzzed, the desire to play some Guilty was still strong in me, so I headed to Vegas. There were a few people playing there and I got some nice games of casuals in. It felt like old times playing drunk back in Chicago at Blacksnake's place since I never play intoxicated anymore these days. After about an hour it started to get dead in there so I figured I should just head to Current and get further drunk. It was more or less a typical night at Current. There were some regulars there but the place wasnt rediculously packed. Chip made his return after a 3 week trip to San Fransisco for a business meeting. We talked a lot about various things and about Street Fighter IV and he was telling me stories about Ono since he knew him back when he used to work for Capcom. He still is skepticle of how this game is going to turn out. I told him about my impressions of the game from playing it at AOU. There of course were some posative things and some negative things but IMO the game still needs a lot more work and Chip doesnt think that Ono is going to pull through on this one unfortunately. The bar ended up staying open till 6 am which is an hour more than ussual. There were enough people there till late to justify keeping it open longer. As a result I was drinking from about 8pm to 6am, yet I still felt fine. Granted I was wasted but I wasnt feeling sick or anything like that. I left and headed to the ussual spot for sleep.
Saturday I woke up and my head didnt hurt at all thanks to the fact that I drank the whisky BEFORE all that beer. I got an email from Masami (one of the bar tenders of Current) saying that he was playing a concert somewhere in Tokyo with his friends from Norway (the 2 guys that I met the weekend of the Iron Maiden and AOU show). I wanted to go see his show but I already had made plans with Liz so I told him I would just see him later that night at Current. Liz told me to meet her at Takadanobaba at around 6:30 pm for the show. That meant I had about 5 or 6 hours of time to play some Guilty so I headed for Akihabara casuals. I enjoyed a nice long session of Gear and played well for the most part. At one point I had a 17 win streak until I eventually lost in a close match to a Millia player (::shakes fist at Millia::). Eventually it was about time to go so I headed for Takadanobaba.
I met Liz in front of the Takadanobaba train station and we took a short walk over to the small club where the concert was going to take place. By the time we got our tickets and I shoved my large backpack into a tiny 100 yen pay locker (somehow), I cashed in my free drink voucher that came with the ticket at the bar and got myself a Kirin on tap. We headed into the tiny room where the concert was going to take place. There was hardly anyone there at all. This concert was mostly just smaller underground bands and there were 7 different ones playing that night. I think we might have missed the 1st or 2nd band that went on but I didnt really care nor did Liz since the only one she ever heard of was Quaff and I never heard of any of em at all. The first band that we saw play I think was called Core9th or something, they had a guitarist who sang, a bassist, and a drummer (who was a hot Japanese chick and was really the only talented one in the band). They had a bunch of sample techno type stuff going on and it sorta just didnt sound that great. After their short set ended I got another beer, I figured I already had one so I might as well just keep drinking until the night was over. The next band to go on was uhh... I honestly dont remember the name and I dont have the ticket stub with me, but it doesnt matter cuz they pretty much sucked. They had 2 singers and 2 guitarists and a bassist and a drummer. All guys, they sounded pretty generic. The coolest thing about them was the lead singer had a nice AC/DC shirt on. After their set I got another beer. The next band to go on was Quaff. These guys had the same linup as the previous band having 2 singers, 2 guitarists, a bassist and a drummer. Unlike the previous band, however, Quaff was actually good. They were the only band that actually played a single fucking guitar solo in any of their songs. The song writing was nice and I actually enjoyed their set. They were sorta like borderline visual kei band but they didnt look overly extreme. One of the dudes had a mask on and most of them had spikey dyed hair, but none of them were wearing drag or anything like that. Liz, of course, thought they were hot. Unfortunately they only played like 7 songs. After their set I grabbed another beer. It was still not too late so we decided to stay and see who the next band was. They were a band called Bermuda Vagabond. To put it quite bluntly they sucked. They had 7 band members. 2 singers, 2 guitarists, 2 drummers, and a bassist. They reminded me of a cross between Slipknot and System of a Down but less tallented than both. Given that I hate Slipknot and think System of a Down is alright on occasion at best, I didnt exactly enjoy their set. The main singer was just this big fat guy who was screaming a lot and the songs all sounded the same. After their set we decided we would just see how the next band was and if they sucked we would leave. They were called the Garlic Boys and I didnt really enjoy them either. Liz described it as "screamo" but whatever you wanna call it... crap is crap. She wasnt digging them either so we left during their 2nd song. As we were leaving, the guys from Quaff were in the lobby/bar area talking to people. I urged Liz to talk to them but she chickened out since she isnt confident in her Japanese and I guess they were sorta intimidating. We got our stuff and stopped at a convenient store to get some quick food.
Liz decided she would go with my to Shinjuku because I wanted to show her Current. She had a hotel already reserved somewhere else in Tokyo though so she could only stay about an hour until the last train left Shinjuku. When we got to Current they had another one of their metal events with guest DJs and as usual the place was packed as hell. Liz isnt much of a metal head but she enjoyed the bar and thought that Mogi (the bartender) was hot but didnt get a chance to talk to him. Eventually Liz had to go so I walked her out and she left. I stayed till closing again and drank the whole time, talking to various people I see there often. The guys from Norway said they were going back to Norway later in the week so I wished em a safe trip back and stuff. Nothing too crazy went on but it was good times and I got good and drunk again. After closing I headed back for more sleep as always.
Since I had no plans at all for Sunday, I dedicated the entire day to playing some Guilty since I didnt get too much time to play this weekend so far (6 or so hours may seem like a lot to some people but for me lately thats not that much for 2 days). I went to Akihabara Club Sega again. It was good and packed and lots of various top players were there. I managed to beat Zero and Osaka B once. I had several small win streaks and was winning more than I was losing in general. Ogawa eventually showed up to and said hi. At one point I left the arcade to get some food. On my way back I passed by another arcade a few doors down from Club Sega and noticed they were having a location test for SFIV so I went in to check it out. They had a bout 6 cabs going and the first thing I noticed was someone was fighting Sagat. I stayed for about 15 mins and watched and I saw both Balrog (boxer) and Sagat in the game. Both characters were CPU only and werent yet on the character select screen. I sorta wanted to play but the line was long and id rather play Gear. I then headed back to Club Sega. When I got back I asked around to various people if they wanted to team up for SBO since I still had no team. I even asked Ogawa if he was going to be able to play in SBO this year and he said maybe but he still isnt sure. After having a bunch of people tell me they already had teams, Basara (the Slayer player I teamed up with a few weeks ago, also the same guy who I hung out with in Tachikawa months ago when they all let me crash at one of their apartments during SB2 quals) showed up. I asked him if he had a team and he said that he was teaming up with Domi, but much to my surprise he said that I could probably be the 3rd member on the team. I was pretty happy to hear this since both Domi and Basara are very solid players. Basara said something about Domi having to work a lot lately though so he wasnt sure how well it will work out. I exchanged contact info with Basara. After that it was about time to leave. I played Ogawa's Eddie 3 times and lost but the last time was extremely close. After that I said goodbye to everyone and left to go home.
On the way home on the train I got an email from Domi. The rundown of the email was basically him thanking me for joining the team. Then he proceeded to explain that he hasnt had the chance to play the game much yet this year and might be a bit rusty and said that he may not be able to go to a lot of qualifiers. He suggested that because of this maybe I should look for another team. I told him that hes a strong player and that I still wanted to team with him. I know that sometimes the Japanese can be very indirect and at first I wasnt sure if he was being honest or if he was saying this in order to sorta indirectly say he didnt want to team with me. I showed the email to my girlfriend later and she told me that it didnt sound like that at all and that he was being sincere. I havnt heard back from either of them yet so I dont really know if this is gonna go down or not, but Domi (AN) / Basara (SL) / ElvenShadow (FA) would be a pretty solid SBO team I think. I guess I will just roll with it for now and see how things go when quals start next month. Ill keep my options open but for now its at least nice to know that I have something to fall back on and am not completely without any options.
I still feel bad about not finding my girlfriends phone btw...
The next morning (Thursday) I woke up to find my car completely burried in snow up to the windshield and considering I had no gas at all basically, I didnt even think about driving to work. I put on my snow pants and walked to work through the thick snow. When I arrived, all of the teachers and many of the students were out front shoveling out the front lot so people could park their cars. I grabbed a shovel and helped dig for a while and we ended up digging well into 1st period. Eventually it was enough and everyone could get their cars in. I walked home and when I returned home I was happy to see that the town did a nice job of clearing out the parking lot in front of my apartment and unburied my car. I had made plans to go skiing with Ryoko (my girlfriend) that evening so after work I changed my clothes and headed out. I was pretty nervous on the way to the gas station that I would break down but luckely I made it there... and I really have no idea how I did considering how long my car was well past Empty.
I picked her up and she told me that she realized that she had lost her cellphone at some point between last night and now. I called her phone to see if it was somewhere in my car but there was no ring. I told her we could check my place later. We enjoyed skiing for 4 hours at a place like only 10 mins drive from my apartment. Afterwords our bodies were both pretty tired and we were both pretty hungry. It was already about 10:30 at night at this point but we went back to my place to have some dinner. When we arrived at my apartment Ryoko suggested that I tried calling her phone again in front of my apartment building in the parking lot. Much to my surprise, this time we heard the phone ring in the distance. We headed towards the sound and it lead us to the general area of a pile of snow along side a fence that was about almost as tall as me that went out about 7 feet from the fence and stretched along side it for maybe 3o feet. The phone must have fallen out of her purse when we were getting in my car to go home Wednesday night during the blizzard and got plowed into the big snow pile when they cleaned out the parking lot. We were happy to hear the phone ring but then were suddenly filled with a sense of despair as we then heard the sound of her phones battery dying. As a result I couldnt keep calling her phone to confirm the location so we had a rough idea as to where it was but certainly not very exact. I turned on my car again so that we could use the headlights to see and I grabbed a shovel and started digging. I gave her another shovel that I had in my car but was unfortunately pretty weak so it didnt do much good. I probably dug in the snow for around 45 minutes. My body was already aching from the skiing all day and all the digging earlier but I kept trying. Eventually after 45 mins she told me to just give up. I had already dug up a section of the giant snow pile all the way to the fence and theres no way of telling if I had simply completely missed the phone or if I had already dug it out and re buried it without being able to see it. I didnt want to give up because I felt bad knowing that the phone was somewhere there and all of her contact information for people she knows was stored in her phone and she didnt have most of the info anywhere else. It seriously felt like looking for a needle in a haystack (at the risk of sounding cliche) or digging for some buried treasure when you dont know where the fucking X is... except pirates got to dig for treasure on a tropical island while drunk on fine rum... I was sober and freezing. I told her sorry and that I felt bad for not finding it but she was happy that I at least tried (though I still feel bad). I made us some spaghetti and then drove her home since it was already really late and we both had work in the morning.
The next day (Friday) I went to school and it was more or less a regular day... until 6th period. Many of the student's parents came to watch their classes and we had several of them come watch our 6th period English class. It was no big deal to me and I didnt mind. However.... the parents stayed after 6th period and had a meeting with some of the teachers. When 4:15 rolled around I got ready to leave the school and head home to get my stuff and drive to the train station just to catch the 5 pm train as I always do. Unfortunately, when I went outside to go to my car I found that doing so was impossable. Due to the fact that our school isnt very big and to all the snow, the parents had to just pile their cars in anywhere that they could find room. This meant that my car was now blocked by about 10 or so parents cars and I had no way to go home until their meetings were over. I sat around and waited, hoping that they would leave soon. After much time eventually I got out of there a little after 6 pm. I knew that by the time I got to Tokyo it was going to be almost 10 pm so I figured going to Akihabara to play casuals was more or less pointless since sometimes people start to clear out of there as early as 10:30 or 11. Knowing this I figured I would make the most of the situation so I decided I would get nice a drunk. Before getting on the train I bought a bottle of Suntory whiskey from 7-11. I slept for an hour on the train and then after I transfered trains at Takasaki I spent the next 2 hours on the train, drinking whiskey and chasing it with cola, and playing Final Fantasy V on my DS. I had to get off at Akabane to transfer again since I was heading straight to Shinjuku this time. I used the opportunity to buy the latest Arcadia from the bookstore at the station since I didnt know the tournament schedule for the weekend yet. Much to my dissapointment, there were no tournaments scheduled anywhere in Tokyo, Chiba, or Saitama for the entire weekend. I recieved an email from my friend Liz while I was on the train. Liz is also an ALT and lives in the city of Numata which is next to where I live. She said that there was a concert of this Japanese band that she likes called Quaff and they were playing in Tokyo at Takadanobaba on Saturday evening. She asked if I would go with her. Finding out that there were no tournaments afterall I told her I would go with her and to reserve me a ticket.
By the time I finally arrived in Shinjuku I had finished the entire bottle of whiskey and was feeling pretty good. It was about 10 pm and even though I was pretty buzzed, the desire to play some Guilty was still strong in me, so I headed to Vegas. There were a few people playing there and I got some nice games of casuals in. It felt like old times playing drunk back in Chicago at Blacksnake's place since I never play intoxicated anymore these days. After about an hour it started to get dead in there so I figured I should just head to Current and get further drunk. It was more or less a typical night at Current. There were some regulars there but the place wasnt rediculously packed. Chip made his return after a 3 week trip to San Fransisco for a business meeting. We talked a lot about various things and about Street Fighter IV and he was telling me stories about Ono since he knew him back when he used to work for Capcom. He still is skepticle of how this game is going to turn out. I told him about my impressions of the game from playing it at AOU. There of course were some posative things and some negative things but IMO the game still needs a lot more work and Chip doesnt think that Ono is going to pull through on this one unfortunately. The bar ended up staying open till 6 am which is an hour more than ussual. There were enough people there till late to justify keeping it open longer. As a result I was drinking from about 8pm to 6am, yet I still felt fine. Granted I was wasted but I wasnt feeling sick or anything like that. I left and headed to the ussual spot for sleep.
Saturday I woke up and my head didnt hurt at all thanks to the fact that I drank the whisky BEFORE all that beer. I got an email from Masami (one of the bar tenders of Current) saying that he was playing a concert somewhere in Tokyo with his friends from Norway (the 2 guys that I met the weekend of the Iron Maiden and AOU show). I wanted to go see his show but I already had made plans with Liz so I told him I would just see him later that night at Current. Liz told me to meet her at Takadanobaba at around 6:30 pm for the show. That meant I had about 5 or 6 hours of time to play some Guilty so I headed for Akihabara casuals. I enjoyed a nice long session of Gear and played well for the most part. At one point I had a 17 win streak until I eventually lost in a close match to a Millia player (::shakes fist at Millia::). Eventually it was about time to go so I headed for Takadanobaba.
I met Liz in front of the Takadanobaba train station and we took a short walk over to the small club where the concert was going to take place. By the time we got our tickets and I shoved my large backpack into a tiny 100 yen pay locker (somehow), I cashed in my free drink voucher that came with the ticket at the bar and got myself a Kirin on tap. We headed into the tiny room where the concert was going to take place. There was hardly anyone there at all. This concert was mostly just smaller underground bands and there were 7 different ones playing that night. I think we might have missed the 1st or 2nd band that went on but I didnt really care nor did Liz since the only one she ever heard of was Quaff and I never heard of any of em at all. The first band that we saw play I think was called Core9th or something, they had a guitarist who sang, a bassist, and a drummer (who was a hot Japanese chick and was really the only talented one in the band). They had a bunch of sample techno type stuff going on and it sorta just didnt sound that great. After their short set ended I got another beer, I figured I already had one so I might as well just keep drinking until the night was over. The next band to go on was uhh... I honestly dont remember the name and I dont have the ticket stub with me, but it doesnt matter cuz they pretty much sucked. They had 2 singers and 2 guitarists and a bassist and a drummer. All guys, they sounded pretty generic. The coolest thing about them was the lead singer had a nice AC/DC shirt on. After their set I got another beer. The next band to go on was Quaff. These guys had the same linup as the previous band having 2 singers, 2 guitarists, a bassist and a drummer. Unlike the previous band, however, Quaff was actually good. They were the only band that actually played a single fucking guitar solo in any of their songs. The song writing was nice and I actually enjoyed their set. They were sorta like borderline visual kei band but they didnt look overly extreme. One of the dudes had a mask on and most of them had spikey dyed hair, but none of them were wearing drag or anything like that. Liz, of course, thought they were hot. Unfortunately they only played like 7 songs. After their set I grabbed another beer. It was still not too late so we decided to stay and see who the next band was. They were a band called Bermuda Vagabond. To put it quite bluntly they sucked. They had 7 band members. 2 singers, 2 guitarists, 2 drummers, and a bassist. They reminded me of a cross between Slipknot and System of a Down but less tallented than both. Given that I hate Slipknot and think System of a Down is alright on occasion at best, I didnt exactly enjoy their set. The main singer was just this big fat guy who was screaming a lot and the songs all sounded the same. After their set we decided we would just see how the next band was and if they sucked we would leave. They were called the Garlic Boys and I didnt really enjoy them either. Liz described it as "screamo" but whatever you wanna call it... crap is crap. She wasnt digging them either so we left during their 2nd song. As we were leaving, the guys from Quaff were in the lobby/bar area talking to people. I urged Liz to talk to them but she chickened out since she isnt confident in her Japanese and I guess they were sorta intimidating. We got our stuff and stopped at a convenient store to get some quick food.
Liz decided she would go with my to Shinjuku because I wanted to show her Current. She had a hotel already reserved somewhere else in Tokyo though so she could only stay about an hour until the last train left Shinjuku. When we got to Current they had another one of their metal events with guest DJs and as usual the place was packed as hell. Liz isnt much of a metal head but she enjoyed the bar and thought that Mogi (the bartender) was hot but didnt get a chance to talk to him. Eventually Liz had to go so I walked her out and she left. I stayed till closing again and drank the whole time, talking to various people I see there often. The guys from Norway said they were going back to Norway later in the week so I wished em a safe trip back and stuff. Nothing too crazy went on but it was good times and I got good and drunk again. After closing I headed back for more sleep as always.
Since I had no plans at all for Sunday, I dedicated the entire day to playing some Guilty since I didnt get too much time to play this weekend so far (6 or so hours may seem like a lot to some people but for me lately thats not that much for 2 days). I went to Akihabara Club Sega again. It was good and packed and lots of various top players were there. I managed to beat Zero and Osaka B once. I had several small win streaks and was winning more than I was losing in general. Ogawa eventually showed up to and said hi. At one point I left the arcade to get some food. On my way back I passed by another arcade a few doors down from Club Sega and noticed they were having a location test for SFIV so I went in to check it out. They had a bout 6 cabs going and the first thing I noticed was someone was fighting Sagat. I stayed for about 15 mins and watched and I saw both Balrog (boxer) and Sagat in the game. Both characters were CPU only and werent yet on the character select screen. I sorta wanted to play but the line was long and id rather play Gear. I then headed back to Club Sega. When I got back I asked around to various people if they wanted to team up for SBO since I still had no team. I even asked Ogawa if he was going to be able to play in SBO this year and he said maybe but he still isnt sure. After having a bunch of people tell me they already had teams, Basara (the Slayer player I teamed up with a few weeks ago, also the same guy who I hung out with in Tachikawa months ago when they all let me crash at one of their apartments during SB2 quals) showed up. I asked him if he had a team and he said that he was teaming up with Domi, but much to my surprise he said that I could probably be the 3rd member on the team. I was pretty happy to hear this since both Domi and Basara are very solid players. Basara said something about Domi having to work a lot lately though so he wasnt sure how well it will work out. I exchanged contact info with Basara. After that it was about time to leave. I played Ogawa's Eddie 3 times and lost but the last time was extremely close. After that I said goodbye to everyone and left to go home.
On the way home on the train I got an email from Domi. The rundown of the email was basically him thanking me for joining the team. Then he proceeded to explain that he hasnt had the chance to play the game much yet this year and might be a bit rusty and said that he may not be able to go to a lot of qualifiers. He suggested that because of this maybe I should look for another team. I told him that hes a strong player and that I still wanted to team with him. I know that sometimes the Japanese can be very indirect and at first I wasnt sure if he was being honest or if he was saying this in order to sorta indirectly say he didnt want to team with me. I showed the email to my girlfriend later and she told me that it didnt sound like that at all and that he was being sincere. I havnt heard back from either of them yet so I dont really know if this is gonna go down or not, but Domi (AN) / Basara (SL) / ElvenShadow (FA) would be a pretty solid SBO team I think. I guess I will just roll with it for now and see how things go when quals start next month. Ill keep my options open but for now its at least nice to know that I have something to fall back on and am not completely without any options.
I still feel bad about not finding my girlfriends phone btw...
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
I lose for free thanks to a misprint and my penis!
As usual I started off the weekend with a night of casuals at Akihabara. I played for a bit and had a small win streak that was ended by a beastly Zappa player. I looked around the other side of the cabs after I lost and it was Imo. I played for a little while and did pretty well, winning some, losing some. FAB was there and I played him once or twice and lost. Then I played him again and much to my surprise I managed to beat him. I beat a few more people and then FAB played me again and he won. After playing for a little while longer, eventually players became a bit scarce and it took forever for anyone to challenge me. I hate playing the damn AI so I decided to head to Shinjuku. As I was walking towards the train station I saw a group of top players including Imo and FAB that had left earlier, crossing the street and heading back to Club Sega. I didnt want to just like follow them back in and I already was on my way out so I just went to Shinjuku anyway. I still wanted to play some more though so I figured I would swing Vegas first and see if there was any action there. When I arrived at Vegas I was pleased to see that there were about 10 or so people there playing which is great for 4 cabinets. One of the cabinets had a seat opened. I looked at the screen and it was a Dizzy player with like 17 wins. I looked around the other side and it was H.H. I was eager to play him so I got on the cab. I played him in a few matches and kept getting really close but just not getting that last round. After about 4 games I finally beat H.H. and ended his long win streak. Unfortunately after I won he left the arcade. At this point it was almost midnight so i'm sure he wanted to go home. A few more people played against me but then it got stagnant and I found myself fighting the AI again for longer than I would have liked so I just said fuck it and headed to Current for some beers.
When I got to Current it was semi dead. There were only a few people there. I stayed for a few beers but then most of the people eventually left so it was pretty lame. I decided maybe I would have better luck trying to go to GODZ. When I arrived at GODZ, much to my surprise, the place was pretty lively. One of the bar tenders told me that tonight they were celebrating because the owner of the bar was going to be getting married. Not long after, even more people showed up. It was a group of people that came from PSY. Appearently they closed down PSY early because the owner of PSY is a friend of the guys from GODZ so he told everyone to go to GODZ and celebrate. Among the group that came was Heidi (the norwegian girl who is friends with Masami) along with the other guy who was there with us several weeks ago who was writing haikus, and this other girl that was friends with them who was from Texas. The haiku guy was already wasted. I said hi to him when he came in and he asked where im from. I was like.... dude wtf... and hes like OOOHHHH its you! Sorry man im wasted!!!! He sure was... The girl from Texas, Jessie (an ex Nova employee now living in Tokyo studying english) told me she had an extra ticket to the X-japan reunion concert that was going on at the end of next month. She said theres a good chance she could sell it to me and I was pretty psyched about that since X-japan fuckin rocks and getting tickets to this rare sold out event is pretty fuckin hard. Eventually shit got really crazy. They started busting out confetti poper thingys and like 50 bottles of free champaign. People were just fuckin shaking the bottles of champaign and spraying it all over the place. Everyone started taking their shirts off.. even some of the girls. I honestly hate champaign, i think it tastes like crap. Ill drink just about anything but champaign is at the bottom of my list. However, who am I to pass up free booze at a bar in Tokyo? I just chugged whole glasses of the crap at a time to avoid the taste and chased it with beer. The place stayed opened for extra late, till like past 6 am. Eventually Heidi got sick and started puking in the sink and they were starting to get everyone ready to leave so I just said goodbye and headed out to go sleeping at the usual place.
The next day I headed to the travel agency located not far from the manga kissa I slept at. I tried to make plans for my spring break trip to Thailand. It turns out that the plane ticket is going to cost about $600 round trip. Thats a bit more than I was originally planning to spend. At first I sorta had decided that I was going to go to Kansai for the first weekend of spring break and then head to Thailand from there, but the travel agent told me that unless my departure and return location were the same that it would cost a ton more... meaning id have to fly back to Osaka and then go back to Tokyo from there rather than flying back to Tokyo. Because of this, and the fact that I now possibly have an opportunity to go see X-japan in Tokyo on the 31st of March, I decided that I could just spend the first weekend in Tokyo and then go to Thailand from there. I had the travel agent reserve the flight for me but told him that I would call him early next week and tell him my final decision. However, the urge to go to Kansai is very strong and I really wanna play some Gear at A-cho. Because of this, and the fact that the Thailand ticket is a bit costly, I think I will just cancel the flight and go to Kansai instead from the 1st to the 6th of April. I can just go to Thailand next Spring and this way I will have more time to prepare. I will most likely call the dude tonight and tell him to cancel. He was really helpfull though.
After that, it was time to head over to Chiba. In the back of this month's Arcadia, they have a tournament listed at Messe102 for 2/23 (Saturday, as in the day I am talking about right now). After a long train ride and accidently getting on the wrong train and having to backtrack because the damn destination sign on the train was mis labaled, I arrived at Messe102. Immedietly I knew something was wrong. There were only like 4 or 5 guys there playing and the tournament was scheduled to start in less than 1 hour. I asked one of them if there was a tournament today and he told me that it was actually yesterday. I dont know who fucked up, if Arcadia printed the wrong date, or if the arcade changed the date of the tournament after advertising in Arcadia, but either way I sorta got poked in the butt on this one. The place only had 2 cabs and the players there were decent but not spectacular. I would get on the cab and win about 10 matches and then lose one and then the process would repeat. Eventually I was getting tired of playing there and it was about 7 pm. I wanted to play some more games in Tokyo so I left. When I got to the train platform I noticed there was an unusually large ammount of people waiting for the train. Then I noticed that the sign said that the next scheduled train was scheduled to arive over an hour ago... meaning there was a massive delay. After waiting for maybe 30-40 minutes the train finally came. When I transfered trains at Chiba station there was another delay and it took fuckin forever to get back to Shinjuku. I headed to Vegas again for some more casuals. Played for a little but nothing extremely note worthy happened. There was a female HOS there and she played against me about 10 or so times, failing to beat me. Eventually she stopped playing and then no one else was really playing against me so I called it a night and headed back to Current.
Current was a little more lively this time than the previous night. I just pretty much drank and talked to some people for most of the night. Later at around 4 am some of the Cirque guys showed up with some random girls. They said it was one of their birthdays. As a birthday gift, Sushi (the owner of Current) gave the guy this gigantic gin and tonic in this huge fuckin test tube bottle that looked like a giant bong. They stayed open a little later due to it being his birthday and then eventually the place was closing so the guys headed out with their group of random girls and a full bottle of classy gin that the guy got as a gift from someone at work. Seems like they probably had a nice night. I left and went to sleep as usual.
I woke up the next day excited to finally play in a tournament since there was one scheduled at Shinjuku sportsland. I headed to Vegas first for some casuals but it was kinda dead. Then I figured maybe everyone was playing at Sportsland so I went there. When I got there, only 2 people were playing. I played against this one Millia player and beat him and then he left.... Then I noticed a few girls show up. Then it instantly clicked. I checked the flyer for the tournament on the wall, and once again my dumbass managed to overlook the fact that this was another ladies only tournament. Bummed out, I imedietly left and headed to Akihabara for a long day of casuals. As I was exiting Akihabara station, I saw Osaka B far in front of me on the escalator. He was heading to Club Sega as well. When I got there the place was nice a full of gear comp. There were a few top players there. I played for a while and did generally well. I played against Osaka B and lost, but then after waiting for 2 other people to play I played him again and this time I beat him in a mirror match. After beating a few more people I eventually lost and went around to the other side of the cab. There was a open seat on the cab next to Osaka B so I played there. Shortly after I felt a tap on my shoulder and turned around to see Ogawa grinning cheerfully as usual and he said hi. I played like 2 games and then all of a sudden no one was playing against me. I made a comment to Ogawa that this is boring and no one wants to play me. He jokingly said its because im too strong and they are afraid of me haha. Eventually I got to like stage 9 on arcade mode and just said fuck it and got off the machine and went around to the other side to play against Osaka B again since no one was playing him at the moment. I lost this time but played him once more and much to my surprise I managed to win another mirror match against him. Then for some reason he picked HOS on me a few times and lost and then I think he just started playing on a different cab. I also noticed that after I had moved to the other cab, about 5 mins after a bunch of people suddently just appeared back there and 2 people got on the cab that I was using before which was now completely empty. Bad timing I guess. I played for a bit longer and eventually it was time to leave. I never got around to playing against Ogawa.
Thats about it. I was pretty psyched to play in some tournaments and ended up just playing casuals all weekend unfortunately. As far as next week goes, I have no idea whats going on. The current Arcadia only has listings up until next Friday, so Saturday and Sunday are a mystery right now. I probably wont know if there are any tournaments until I get to Tokyo next weekend. Hopefully there will be something, but if the current trend repeats itself, there wont be much going on during the first weekend of the month.
When I got to Current it was semi dead. There were only a few people there. I stayed for a few beers but then most of the people eventually left so it was pretty lame. I decided maybe I would have better luck trying to go to GODZ. When I arrived at GODZ, much to my surprise, the place was pretty lively. One of the bar tenders told me that tonight they were celebrating because the owner of the bar was going to be getting married. Not long after, even more people showed up. It was a group of people that came from PSY. Appearently they closed down PSY early because the owner of PSY is a friend of the guys from GODZ so he told everyone to go to GODZ and celebrate. Among the group that came was Heidi (the norwegian girl who is friends with Masami) along with the other guy who was there with us several weeks ago who was writing haikus, and this other girl that was friends with them who was from Texas. The haiku guy was already wasted. I said hi to him when he came in and he asked where im from. I was like.... dude wtf... and hes like OOOHHHH its you! Sorry man im wasted!!!! He sure was... The girl from Texas, Jessie (an ex Nova employee now living in Tokyo studying english) told me she had an extra ticket to the X-japan reunion concert that was going on at the end of next month. She said theres a good chance she could sell it to me and I was pretty psyched about that since X-japan fuckin rocks and getting tickets to this rare sold out event is pretty fuckin hard. Eventually shit got really crazy. They started busting out confetti poper thingys and like 50 bottles of free champaign. People were just fuckin shaking the bottles of champaign and spraying it all over the place. Everyone started taking their shirts off.. even some of the girls. I honestly hate champaign, i think it tastes like crap. Ill drink just about anything but champaign is at the bottom of my list. However, who am I to pass up free booze at a bar in Tokyo? I just chugged whole glasses of the crap at a time to avoid the taste and chased it with beer. The place stayed opened for extra late, till like past 6 am. Eventually Heidi got sick and started puking in the sink and they were starting to get everyone ready to leave so I just said goodbye and headed out to go sleeping at the usual place.
The next day I headed to the travel agency located not far from the manga kissa I slept at. I tried to make plans for my spring break trip to Thailand. It turns out that the plane ticket is going to cost about $600 round trip. Thats a bit more than I was originally planning to spend. At first I sorta had decided that I was going to go to Kansai for the first weekend of spring break and then head to Thailand from there, but the travel agent told me that unless my departure and return location were the same that it would cost a ton more... meaning id have to fly back to Osaka and then go back to Tokyo from there rather than flying back to Tokyo. Because of this, and the fact that I now possibly have an opportunity to go see X-japan in Tokyo on the 31st of March, I decided that I could just spend the first weekend in Tokyo and then go to Thailand from there. I had the travel agent reserve the flight for me but told him that I would call him early next week and tell him my final decision. However, the urge to go to Kansai is very strong and I really wanna play some Gear at A-cho. Because of this, and the fact that the Thailand ticket is a bit costly, I think I will just cancel the flight and go to Kansai instead from the 1st to the 6th of April. I can just go to Thailand next Spring and this way I will have more time to prepare. I will most likely call the dude tonight and tell him to cancel. He was really helpfull though.
After that, it was time to head over to Chiba. In the back of this month's Arcadia, they have a tournament listed at Messe102 for 2/23 (Saturday, as in the day I am talking about right now). After a long train ride and accidently getting on the wrong train and having to backtrack because the damn destination sign on the train was mis labaled, I arrived at Messe102. Immedietly I knew something was wrong. There were only like 4 or 5 guys there playing and the tournament was scheduled to start in less than 1 hour. I asked one of them if there was a tournament today and he told me that it was actually yesterday. I dont know who fucked up, if Arcadia printed the wrong date, or if the arcade changed the date of the tournament after advertising in Arcadia, but either way I sorta got poked in the butt on this one. The place only had 2 cabs and the players there were decent but not spectacular. I would get on the cab and win about 10 matches and then lose one and then the process would repeat. Eventually I was getting tired of playing there and it was about 7 pm. I wanted to play some more games in Tokyo so I left. When I got to the train platform I noticed there was an unusually large ammount of people waiting for the train. Then I noticed that the sign said that the next scheduled train was scheduled to arive over an hour ago... meaning there was a massive delay. After waiting for maybe 30-40 minutes the train finally came. When I transfered trains at Chiba station there was another delay and it took fuckin forever to get back to Shinjuku. I headed to Vegas again for some more casuals. Played for a little but nothing extremely note worthy happened. There was a female HOS there and she played against me about 10 or so times, failing to beat me. Eventually she stopped playing and then no one else was really playing against me so I called it a night and headed back to Current.
Current was a little more lively this time than the previous night. I just pretty much drank and talked to some people for most of the night. Later at around 4 am some of the Cirque guys showed up with some random girls. They said it was one of their birthdays. As a birthday gift, Sushi (the owner of Current) gave the guy this gigantic gin and tonic in this huge fuckin test tube bottle that looked like a giant bong. They stayed open a little later due to it being his birthday and then eventually the place was closing so the guys headed out with their group of random girls and a full bottle of classy gin that the guy got as a gift from someone at work. Seems like they probably had a nice night. I left and went to sleep as usual.
I woke up the next day excited to finally play in a tournament since there was one scheduled at Shinjuku sportsland. I headed to Vegas first for some casuals but it was kinda dead. Then I figured maybe everyone was playing at Sportsland so I went there. When I got there, only 2 people were playing. I played against this one Millia player and beat him and then he left.... Then I noticed a few girls show up. Then it instantly clicked. I checked the flyer for the tournament on the wall, and once again my dumbass managed to overlook the fact that this was another ladies only tournament. Bummed out, I imedietly left and headed to Akihabara for a long day of casuals. As I was exiting Akihabara station, I saw Osaka B far in front of me on the escalator. He was heading to Club Sega as well. When I got there the place was nice a full of gear comp. There were a few top players there. I played for a while and did generally well. I played against Osaka B and lost, but then after waiting for 2 other people to play I played him again and this time I beat him in a mirror match. After beating a few more people I eventually lost and went around to the other side of the cab. There was a open seat on the cab next to Osaka B so I played there. Shortly after I felt a tap on my shoulder and turned around to see Ogawa grinning cheerfully as usual and he said hi. I played like 2 games and then all of a sudden no one was playing against me. I made a comment to Ogawa that this is boring and no one wants to play me. He jokingly said its because im too strong and they are afraid of me haha. Eventually I got to like stage 9 on arcade mode and just said fuck it and got off the machine and went around to the other side to play against Osaka B again since no one was playing him at the moment. I lost this time but played him once more and much to my surprise I managed to win another mirror match against him. Then for some reason he picked HOS on me a few times and lost and then I think he just started playing on a different cab. I also noticed that after I had moved to the other cab, about 5 mins after a bunch of people suddently just appeared back there and 2 people got on the cab that I was using before which was now completely empty. Bad timing I guess. I played for a bit longer and eventually it was time to leave. I never got around to playing against Ogawa.
Thats about it. I was pretty psyched to play in some tournaments and ended up just playing casuals all weekend unfortunately. As far as next week goes, I have no idea whats going on. The current Arcadia only has listings up until next Friday, so Saturday and Sunday are a mystery right now. I probably wont know if there are any tournaments until I get to Tokyo next weekend. Hopefully there will be something, but if the current trend repeats itself, there wont be much going on during the first weekend of the month.
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
AOU, Iron Maiden, and G3 Finals
Friday night I arrived in Akihabara as usual for casuals. Nothing too out of the ordinary happened. Played alright... won some... lost some. I stayed fairly late and then headed to Current in Shinjuku for drinking. I wasn't expecting the place to be very busy tonight but it turned out to be packed as hell. It turns out that tonight was the Helloween and Gamma Ray concert in Tokyo. I knew it was coming up soon but im not exactly a gigantic fan of either of those bands. I enjoy extremely cheesey power metal on occasion but I already decided I would go to Iron Maiden and it was too much money to throw down so soon for concerts. I said hi to a few people I know and then sat at the bar. Someone had informed me that some of the guys from Helloween and Gamma Ray would actually be coming to Current tonight after the show. Current has a history of a lot of big names coming there after concerts in Tokyo so this didn't surprise me much. Most recently, Jimmy Page and Dave Mustaine had visited Current. So after a while a few of the members of Helloween and Gamma Ray showed up. Kai Hansen was there. He used to be the guitarist and singer of Helloween but he later left the band and joined Gamma ray. The guy who replaced Kai Hansen in Helloween was named Michael Kiske (hence the origin of the name Ky (Kai) Kiske of Guilty Gear). Markus Großkopf, the bassist of Helloween was also there. I honestly didnt give that much of a shit that they showed up since I didnt even go to their show, so I didnt go out of my way to talk to any of them or anything. However, when I was sitting at the bar, Markus Großkopf talked to me briefly and we had a little toast and stuff. He was a pretty down to earth dude. There was this drunken Japanese fanboy that was like being all over excited and shit and just blabbering on about how much they rock and are gods and shit to Markus Großkopf. I could tell by the look on this face that he thought this guy was a moron but he was doing his best to just kinda deal with the dude without telling him to fuck off or something like that. So after a long night of drinking I headed out. I got a quick picture with Markus Großkopf just for the hell of it and headed out.
The next day I woke up and headed out to Makahari Messe in Chiba for the AOU convention and the Iron Maiden show (which luckely were right in the same building. When I arrived at AOU the show had already been going on for several hours so there was no line to get in or anything. I went to the desk designated for press and overseas visitors which ended up being the wrong one. They told me I needed a business card to get a badge from there. So the pointed me in the direction to go to where I need to buy a badge. I didnt see where to go at first and then some guy asked me if I needed help finding it and pointed me in the right direction. But then as I was heading over there he stopped me and just gave me a free badge. I have absoloutly no idea why but I was happy to save the 1000 yen it costs to get in and ended up getting free access to the convention. This was the same venue where the Tokyo Game Show was and basically AOU felt like a smaller TGS. It only used about half the space that TGS used. However, there were still booths for all the big name game developers. It didn't take me very long at all to find the Capcom section whos main attraction was SFIV. There was a long line to play, it took maybe about 45 minutes. They had several cabinets, I would say maybe around 12 or so. There were signs on all the cabinets that said no pictures allowed so I refrained from taking any since I didnt want to risk losing my place in line and not being able to play. However, later on before I left AOU I decided I would just get some footage since I was about to leave and didnt give a shit if they kicked me out at that point, so I ended up with a few pictures and some videos (some are far away and low quality while others are decent. I had to wait in line again to get close to the cabinets to get the decent ones.)
So heres about all the information I gathered about SFIV from watching and playing that I can think of off the top of my head. The character select screen features the original 8 world warriors on the top in 2 rows of 4 just as they were in the original SF2. Then theres a dividing line and Abel and Viper are in the center below it. There were no new characters revealed at the show. The way the select screen looks, it seems like there will only be 16 playable charaters total. However... theres no reason why they couldnt simply fit more in so I am not sure of this, but the way it was designed simply suggested that we may only get 16 characters. You can see the character select screen in one of the vids I took. Most of the old characters dont seem very different at all. There didnt really seem to be any new special moves or anything like that that I noticed. A few characters seemed to have gotten new normals. I remember seeing Dhalsim do a sorta floppy arm downward swat sorta punch move that I dont recognize that looks like a new normal perhaps. I noticed that the damage for this game wasnt very high in general. Throws arnt rediculous or too abusable. In fact, even Zangiefs SPD only does about 1/5 life. Abel seems like hes going to be a better grappler than gief from the little I saw of the game. His throws seem to do as much damage and hes a bit faster. However, I have nothing else to base this on and is simply a prediction from seeing a bunch of scrubs play the game for a brief period of time. I noticed that every character only has 2 colors. I dont know if this is only because its a demo but hopefully they will add more since they will get boring fast. So eventually when it was my chance to play, I ultimately decided to just play Ken since hes a character I am familiar with and it would be easier to compare the game to other SF games that way. I played against an Abel player. Characters have more than one super. Ken has both is original super from ST I also saw someone perform his verticle shoryuken super. Everyone also has an ultimate super but I was unable to find myself in a situation to try it out. The input command for Kens supers were for one of them to do qcf qcf p, and the other was qcf qcf pp (as in 2 punches at the same time). Meter doesnt seem to build very fast in this game and I found myself little opportunity to do very many supers (though I was using some EXes). One thing that stood out a lot to me was how laggy the dashes seemed to feel. When you tap back back or forward forward, it takes a little time for the dash to come out, the character doesnt start moving as soon as you hit the 2nd forward or back on the stick. I had difficulty canceling EXes into dashes and probably just dont know the timing for it. In general, some of the moves seemed to be hard to execute... sometimes I found myself missing simple things from time to time like basic hadoukens (which is by no means difficult). The counter attack move that is executed by pressing both hp and hk at the same time comes out a bit slow. It seems usefull but not abusable. I wasnt really sure what to do afterwards so ussually it just knocked the opponent down and did little damage. I tried to do an airthrow with Ken but nothing came out for some reason. Either I executed it wrong or they removed it from the game. Visually the game looks much nicer in person than in any of the vids. I would have still prefered hi res 2d sprites but for what it is it looks nice with the way they did the 3d graphics, and I dont feel the gameplay suffers as a result so much. In fact, it was probably a smart move since there will be less lag with online play due to the 3d graphics. The game still feels very 2d and feels nothing at all like SFEX. I guess it feels more like ST or CVS2 than anything else. As of now they game just feels very basic. I didnt know what the hell I was doing so im sure once I actually have time to sit down with the game rather than playing a couple of rounds and having to get off the machine, I can write better impressions since these are pretty uninformed and I didnt have time to try much out. My opponent didnt seem to know what he was doing at all either but he was playing Abel and just seemed to be trying out random stuff. When the game comes out for real in arcades I will sit down with it more.
As for BlazBlue, there was a long line for this game as well. Visually I think this game looks great. The 3d backgrounds look amazing and before the match starts it zooms from the background into the forefront and the transition looks great. The animation and characters look fantastic. Many people who were standing in line had magazines with stuff about the game and already seemed to know how to execute a lot of combos and do some good pressure strings and setups. I had absoloutly no idea what the hell I was doing. I got to see a move list for the 4 characters that were playable about 2 minutes before I got to play the game. When I got on the machine I tried out a few random moves to see what they did and then my opponent just started rushing me down all beastly. I played as Jin and he seems like a cross between Ky with a little bit of Johnny as far as the way he plays. One thing I found odd was for Jin and the chick with the guns, they have special move commands that are executed by pressing down up and then an attack button. Im not talking about charge down up like guiles flash kick, I mean you just hit down and then up like if you were to super jump and then the button and the move comes out. Personally I found this very irritating because when I would be crouching and then would want to jump and do a move in the air, i would wind up with the special and it really feels awkward. I took a photo of the command list and will post it in the pictures section. I also took some vids of this game as well, some are very far away while others are sorta decent. All in all the game feels pretty similar to Guilty Gear in all honesty... at least the basic way it plays. Air dashing, air recovery after combos, combo system feels the same. I didnt know anything really about the game specific systems so I wasnt able to test it so much. The main character, Ragna, seems to play very similary to HOS. Tager was semi Potemkin-ish but seemed different enough. I noticed he had a projectile that wall bounced on hit and lead to lots of combo potential. Noel seems pretty unique. Unlike SF4 where after the match both players had to get off the machine, for BlazBlue they let the winner play for a little while. The guy I played against picked the main character and while I almost took a round, he knew way more about what to do in the game so I lost 2 rounds and hardly even got to test anything out. The game will feature a total of 10 characters. You can see silhouettes of the other 6 on the big sign for the game above the display, I took a picture of this as well. The game seems like it can have potential and might be great. I really dont know enough about it, but that weird special move command is really stupid and I hope they change it.
As it was getting late, after I had walked around a bit to check everything else out I decided I would take some quick vids before I had to leave to go to the concert. I wanted to play again but I didnt have enough time. When I left AOU there were several long lines of people lined up outside in the hall way for the Iron Maiden show a few doors down. I could have probably stayed at AOU a little longer because it took a while to let everyone in but I was planning based on the time on the ticket which was wrong which sucks. Eventually I got in the concert. They already had the opening act playing before everyone got inside. I dont know who they were but they were alright I guess. Just some generic sounding band with a female vocalist. I got a beer and made my way into the crowd. The place was all standing and it was pretty packed. All the coin lockers were full so I had to take my backpack in with me which kinda sucked. I must say, the security there was pretty crappy. They asked to check my bag on the way in, and they just opened it, took my pillow out, and let me through, even though there was a ton of other stuff in there and I could have brought anything in with me. They might as well have not even checked. But I guess since Japan is a much safer country in general they just dont put so much concen into that sorta thing. Eventually Maiden came on. They played a lot of great songs and they had multiple backgrounds for the stage that they constantly changed featuring pictures from he albums which was a nice touch. Bruce Dickenson also dressed up in a few costumes during a few songs like in the Trooper and Powerslave for example. I took pictures of this as well. They also had a giant cyborg Eddie (Iron Maidens mascot, the name sake for Guilty Gear's Eddie) come out during the last song before the encore which was amusing. The setlist was as follows
Aces High
2 Minutes to Midnight
Revelations
The Trooper
Wasted Years
The Number of the Beast
Run to the Hills
Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Powerslave
Heaven Can Wait
Can I Play With Madness?
Fear of the Dark
Iron Maiden
Moonchild
The Clairvoyant
Hallowed Be Thy Name
I know the order was different but I cant remember it exactly but they closed with Hallowed Be Thy Name... probably my favorite Maiden song so I was happy with that. Im not really a hardcore Maiden fan but I did enjoy the show and it was good times. After the concert on my way out I ran into Masami (one of the bar tenders from Current). He was there with 2 guys he knows from Norway who were staying in Japan for about 20 days to visit him. I guess they were going to be playing a gig somewhere. These guys said they hated the show. I guess Masami bought the tickets for them without talking about it first so they were dragged along. These guys only seem to like black and death metal and arnt big on anything that remotley resembles power metal. I personally enjoy both but whatever. So it turns out that one of the guys claimes to be one of the best Tekken players in Norway. I told him he should go to Evo. He says every year they hold a tournament to decide who goes. He said he also plays other fighters a little bit, even a little Guilty Gear. We were thinking about stopping at Vegas to play a bit before heading to Current since he was surprised to hear that Tekken 6 was already out and wanted to try it out. We all stood and talked for a bit as we were waiting for another friend of Masami's. Her name was Kana and shes actually a friend of Mayuko (the girl who would often hang out with Chip). Mayuko was still in Hokaido visiting her parents so she didnt go to the concert. We all headed to the train station together and got on a train to head back to Tokyo. The train was packed and we could harldy move. Eventually people started to empty out and we could sit down. It was taking a while so I checked my map and it turns out that we got on the train going the wrong fuckin way. I simply followed them assuming Japanese people who live in Tokyo would know their way around the train system but apearently they dont go to Chiba very often or were just being carless. So we got off the train and then headed back the other way on another train and after a long while we eventually made it to Shinjuku. By this point we were all starving so we stopped to get some food at one of those revolving sushi resturaunts. This place also had draft beers for like 175 yen which is a fuckin deal. We had a lot of food and then headed to Current. We decided not to go to the arcade tonight since it was getting late already. The Norway guys will be staying in Tokyo for a while so maybe I will play againt them next week. So at Current it was pretty busy again and a lot of people from the Maiden show were there. Lots of Japanese as well as a lot of gaijin. There were a few girls there who were also doing the JET program that lived in Chiba. There was also this one girl there covered in tatoos who was an english teacher in Tokyo. She said how she was getting sick of doing it though and might just quit and become a stripper or a dominatrix. She said she has no problem tieing up some loser and whipping him as long as he doesnt touch her. I found that amusing. So basically I stayed till closing and got nice and drunk and headed to the manga kisa for sleep.
I tried to set my alarm somewhat earlier than I normally would because today I would be going back to Chiba again to Game Chariot for the G3 finals tournament. I wanted to try to play in the last chance qualifier. I headed right to the station and took the trip there but it took a little longer than I had anticipated and when I arrived they had already started. MIU was running the tournament and I asked him if I could still enter but he said it was too late. They were 5 person teams so I really dont know if I would been able to find a team anyway. In any case it really didnt matter since I was playing pretty crappy all day and would have most likely been simply a liability to my team mates. I was extremely tired and the competition was just rediculous. Pretty much all the best players in all of Japan were there, including the best of Kansai. They had 8 cabinets set up for casuals and 4 to run the tournament. The girl who often dresses up as the red Millia at Game Chariot was also there as well. The girl who often dresses up as the red Millia at Game Chariot was also there as well. It took forever to get a turn in since even with 8 cabs there were just so many players that you had to wait a long time. I hardly won any matches the entire time I was there and was just in a generally frusterated and irritable mood. I guess it was a combination of feeling a tad hungover mixed with the fact that I was very tired and showed up late and missed the tournament, in addition to all the players just being rediculously good. I beat Nemo and Abegen and a few other random matches but I was losing a lot. A lot of the games were fairly close but I just couldnt put in that extra couple hits which was very frusterating. While waiting for a match I talked a bit with Yoshio (aka spikey haired potemkin) and he told me that his SBO would be himself, Nanashi, and Maruken which is going to be another beastly team to watch out for. Eventually after playing for a very long time the finals started. I missed the first few matches as I was busy playing a match. However, as soon as RF started playing my attention was immedietly glued to the monitor. The final 2 teams were an East Japan team vs a West Japan team. The East Japan team was N (slayer), Haken (Po), 012 (Sol), FAB (Po), and Isa (Eddie). The West team was RF (Faust), Shonen (Testament), N-Otoko (Venom), a Millia player, and the last person im not sure. At the point in which I started watching the finals, Haken had just defeated N-O if I am not mistaken. After that it was RF vs Haken. RF defeated Haken and then he proceeded to defeat 012. Then RF lost to FAB. FAB then lost to Shonen. Isa then defeated Shonen. Final match was Isa vs the Kansai Millia player and Isa once again represented the sheer power and brokeness of Eddie all too well, taking the tournament for an East Japan victory. It was very hype and noisy during the finals and there was just a lot of energy in the room. I got pretty excited as well. After the finals I pretty much had to leave right away since the train I needed to catch in order to get home was coming in a matter of minutes. I said goodbye to MIU and headed out.
On the way home I pretty much slept the entire 4 hours it took to get from Game Chariot to my train station... I was just exhausted. Next week there will be some tournament action going on somewhere in Tokyo. I forgot exactly where but Ill check my arcadia soon and make sure to go. This time I wont have game shows and concerts to attend so I can focus much more on Guilty Gear and should be able to play much better.
The next day I woke up and headed out to Makahari Messe in Chiba for the AOU convention and the Iron Maiden show (which luckely were right in the same building. When I arrived at AOU the show had already been going on for several hours so there was no line to get in or anything. I went to the desk designated for press and overseas visitors which ended up being the wrong one. They told me I needed a business card to get a badge from there. So the pointed me in the direction to go to where I need to buy a badge. I didnt see where to go at first and then some guy asked me if I needed help finding it and pointed me in the right direction. But then as I was heading over there he stopped me and just gave me a free badge. I have absoloutly no idea why but I was happy to save the 1000 yen it costs to get in and ended up getting free access to the convention. This was the same venue where the Tokyo Game Show was and basically AOU felt like a smaller TGS. It only used about half the space that TGS used. However, there were still booths for all the big name game developers. It didn't take me very long at all to find the Capcom section whos main attraction was SFIV. There was a long line to play, it took maybe about 45 minutes. They had several cabinets, I would say maybe around 12 or so. There were signs on all the cabinets that said no pictures allowed so I refrained from taking any since I didnt want to risk losing my place in line and not being able to play. However, later on before I left AOU I decided I would just get some footage since I was about to leave and didnt give a shit if they kicked me out at that point, so I ended up with a few pictures and some videos (some are far away and low quality while others are decent. I had to wait in line again to get close to the cabinets to get the decent ones.)
So heres about all the information I gathered about SFIV from watching and playing that I can think of off the top of my head. The character select screen features the original 8 world warriors on the top in 2 rows of 4 just as they were in the original SF2. Then theres a dividing line and Abel and Viper are in the center below it. There were no new characters revealed at the show. The way the select screen looks, it seems like there will only be 16 playable charaters total. However... theres no reason why they couldnt simply fit more in so I am not sure of this, but the way it was designed simply suggested that we may only get 16 characters. You can see the character select screen in one of the vids I took. Most of the old characters dont seem very different at all. There didnt really seem to be any new special moves or anything like that that I noticed. A few characters seemed to have gotten new normals. I remember seeing Dhalsim do a sorta floppy arm downward swat sorta punch move that I dont recognize that looks like a new normal perhaps. I noticed that the damage for this game wasnt very high in general. Throws arnt rediculous or too abusable. In fact, even Zangiefs SPD only does about 1/5 life. Abel seems like hes going to be a better grappler than gief from the little I saw of the game. His throws seem to do as much damage and hes a bit faster. However, I have nothing else to base this on and is simply a prediction from seeing a bunch of scrubs play the game for a brief period of time. I noticed that every character only has 2 colors. I dont know if this is only because its a demo but hopefully they will add more since they will get boring fast. So eventually when it was my chance to play, I ultimately decided to just play Ken since hes a character I am familiar with and it would be easier to compare the game to other SF games that way. I played against an Abel player. Characters have more than one super. Ken has both is original super from ST I also saw someone perform his verticle shoryuken super. Everyone also has an ultimate super but I was unable to find myself in a situation to try it out. The input command for Kens supers were for one of them to do qcf qcf p, and the other was qcf qcf pp (as in 2 punches at the same time). Meter doesnt seem to build very fast in this game and I found myself little opportunity to do very many supers (though I was using some EXes). One thing that stood out a lot to me was how laggy the dashes seemed to feel. When you tap back back or forward forward, it takes a little time for the dash to come out, the character doesnt start moving as soon as you hit the 2nd forward or back on the stick. I had difficulty canceling EXes into dashes and probably just dont know the timing for it. In general, some of the moves seemed to be hard to execute... sometimes I found myself missing simple things from time to time like basic hadoukens (which is by no means difficult). The counter attack move that is executed by pressing both hp and hk at the same time comes out a bit slow. It seems usefull but not abusable. I wasnt really sure what to do afterwards so ussually it just knocked the opponent down and did little damage. I tried to do an airthrow with Ken but nothing came out for some reason. Either I executed it wrong or they removed it from the game. Visually the game looks much nicer in person than in any of the vids. I would have still prefered hi res 2d sprites but for what it is it looks nice with the way they did the 3d graphics, and I dont feel the gameplay suffers as a result so much. In fact, it was probably a smart move since there will be less lag with online play due to the 3d graphics. The game still feels very 2d and feels nothing at all like SFEX. I guess it feels more like ST or CVS2 than anything else. As of now they game just feels very basic. I didnt know what the hell I was doing so im sure once I actually have time to sit down with the game rather than playing a couple of rounds and having to get off the machine, I can write better impressions since these are pretty uninformed and I didnt have time to try much out. My opponent didnt seem to know what he was doing at all either but he was playing Abel and just seemed to be trying out random stuff. When the game comes out for real in arcades I will sit down with it more.
As for BlazBlue, there was a long line for this game as well. Visually I think this game looks great. The 3d backgrounds look amazing and before the match starts it zooms from the background into the forefront and the transition looks great. The animation and characters look fantastic. Many people who were standing in line had magazines with stuff about the game and already seemed to know how to execute a lot of combos and do some good pressure strings and setups. I had absoloutly no idea what the hell I was doing. I got to see a move list for the 4 characters that were playable about 2 minutes before I got to play the game. When I got on the machine I tried out a few random moves to see what they did and then my opponent just started rushing me down all beastly. I played as Jin and he seems like a cross between Ky with a little bit of Johnny as far as the way he plays. One thing I found odd was for Jin and the chick with the guns, they have special move commands that are executed by pressing down up and then an attack button. Im not talking about charge down up like guiles flash kick, I mean you just hit down and then up like if you were to super jump and then the button and the move comes out. Personally I found this very irritating because when I would be crouching and then would want to jump and do a move in the air, i would wind up with the special and it really feels awkward. I took a photo of the command list and will post it in the pictures section. I also took some vids of this game as well, some are very far away while others are sorta decent. All in all the game feels pretty similar to Guilty Gear in all honesty... at least the basic way it plays. Air dashing, air recovery after combos, combo system feels the same. I didnt know anything really about the game specific systems so I wasnt able to test it so much. The main character, Ragna, seems to play very similary to HOS. Tager was semi Potemkin-ish but seemed different enough. I noticed he had a projectile that wall bounced on hit and lead to lots of combo potential. Noel seems pretty unique. Unlike SF4 where after the match both players had to get off the machine, for BlazBlue they let the winner play for a little while. The guy I played against picked the main character and while I almost took a round, he knew way more about what to do in the game so I lost 2 rounds and hardly even got to test anything out. The game will feature a total of 10 characters. You can see silhouettes of the other 6 on the big sign for the game above the display, I took a picture of this as well. The game seems like it can have potential and might be great. I really dont know enough about it, but that weird special move command is really stupid and I hope they change it.
As it was getting late, after I had walked around a bit to check everything else out I decided I would take some quick vids before I had to leave to go to the concert. I wanted to play again but I didnt have enough time. When I left AOU there were several long lines of people lined up outside in the hall way for the Iron Maiden show a few doors down. I could have probably stayed at AOU a little longer because it took a while to let everyone in but I was planning based on the time on the ticket which was wrong which sucks. Eventually I got in the concert. They already had the opening act playing before everyone got inside. I dont know who they were but they were alright I guess. Just some generic sounding band with a female vocalist. I got a beer and made my way into the crowd. The place was all standing and it was pretty packed. All the coin lockers were full so I had to take my backpack in with me which kinda sucked. I must say, the security there was pretty crappy. They asked to check my bag on the way in, and they just opened it, took my pillow out, and let me through, even though there was a ton of other stuff in there and I could have brought anything in with me. They might as well have not even checked. But I guess since Japan is a much safer country in general they just dont put so much concen into that sorta thing. Eventually Maiden came on. They played a lot of great songs and they had multiple backgrounds for the stage that they constantly changed featuring pictures from he albums which was a nice touch. Bruce Dickenson also dressed up in a few costumes during a few songs like in the Trooper and Powerslave for example. I took pictures of this as well. They also had a giant cyborg Eddie (Iron Maidens mascot, the name sake for Guilty Gear's Eddie) come out during the last song before the encore which was amusing. The setlist was as follows
Aces High
2 Minutes to Midnight
Revelations
The Trooper
Wasted Years
The Number of the Beast
Run to the Hills
Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Powerslave
Heaven Can Wait
Can I Play With Madness?
Fear of the Dark
Iron Maiden
Moonchild
The Clairvoyant
Hallowed Be Thy Name
I know the order was different but I cant remember it exactly but they closed with Hallowed Be Thy Name... probably my favorite Maiden song so I was happy with that. Im not really a hardcore Maiden fan but I did enjoy the show and it was good times. After the concert on my way out I ran into Masami (one of the bar tenders from Current). He was there with 2 guys he knows from Norway who were staying in Japan for about 20 days to visit him. I guess they were going to be playing a gig somewhere. These guys said they hated the show. I guess Masami bought the tickets for them without talking about it first so they were dragged along. These guys only seem to like black and death metal and arnt big on anything that remotley resembles power metal. I personally enjoy both but whatever. So it turns out that one of the guys claimes to be one of the best Tekken players in Norway. I told him he should go to Evo. He says every year they hold a tournament to decide who goes. He said he also plays other fighters a little bit, even a little Guilty Gear. We were thinking about stopping at Vegas to play a bit before heading to Current since he was surprised to hear that Tekken 6 was already out and wanted to try it out. We all stood and talked for a bit as we were waiting for another friend of Masami's. Her name was Kana and shes actually a friend of Mayuko (the girl who would often hang out with Chip). Mayuko was still in Hokaido visiting her parents so she didnt go to the concert. We all headed to the train station together and got on a train to head back to Tokyo. The train was packed and we could harldy move. Eventually people started to empty out and we could sit down. It was taking a while so I checked my map and it turns out that we got on the train going the wrong fuckin way. I simply followed them assuming Japanese people who live in Tokyo would know their way around the train system but apearently they dont go to Chiba very often or were just being carless. So we got off the train and then headed back the other way on another train and after a long while we eventually made it to Shinjuku. By this point we were all starving so we stopped to get some food at one of those revolving sushi resturaunts. This place also had draft beers for like 175 yen which is a fuckin deal. We had a lot of food and then headed to Current. We decided not to go to the arcade tonight since it was getting late already. The Norway guys will be staying in Tokyo for a while so maybe I will play againt them next week. So at Current it was pretty busy again and a lot of people from the Maiden show were there. Lots of Japanese as well as a lot of gaijin. There were a few girls there who were also doing the JET program that lived in Chiba. There was also this one girl there covered in tatoos who was an english teacher in Tokyo. She said how she was getting sick of doing it though and might just quit and become a stripper or a dominatrix. She said she has no problem tieing up some loser and whipping him as long as he doesnt touch her. I found that amusing. So basically I stayed till closing and got nice and drunk and headed to the manga kisa for sleep.
I tried to set my alarm somewhat earlier than I normally would because today I would be going back to Chiba again to Game Chariot for the G3 finals tournament. I wanted to try to play in the last chance qualifier. I headed right to the station and took the trip there but it took a little longer than I had anticipated and when I arrived they had already started. MIU was running the tournament and I asked him if I could still enter but he said it was too late. They were 5 person teams so I really dont know if I would been able to find a team anyway. In any case it really didnt matter since I was playing pretty crappy all day and would have most likely been simply a liability to my team mates. I was extremely tired and the competition was just rediculous. Pretty much all the best players in all of Japan were there, including the best of Kansai. They had 8 cabinets set up for casuals and 4 to run the tournament. The girl who often dresses up as the red Millia at Game Chariot was also there as well. The girl who often dresses up as the red Millia at Game Chariot was also there as well. It took forever to get a turn in since even with 8 cabs there were just so many players that you had to wait a long time. I hardly won any matches the entire time I was there and was just in a generally frusterated and irritable mood. I guess it was a combination of feeling a tad hungover mixed with the fact that I was very tired and showed up late and missed the tournament, in addition to all the players just being rediculously good. I beat Nemo and Abegen and a few other random matches but I was losing a lot. A lot of the games were fairly close but I just couldnt put in that extra couple hits which was very frusterating. While waiting for a match I talked a bit with Yoshio (aka spikey haired potemkin) and he told me that his SBO would be himself, Nanashi, and Maruken which is going to be another beastly team to watch out for. Eventually after playing for a very long time the finals started. I missed the first few matches as I was busy playing a match. However, as soon as RF started playing my attention was immedietly glued to the monitor. The final 2 teams were an East Japan team vs a West Japan team. The East Japan team was N (slayer), Haken (Po), 012 (Sol), FAB (Po), and Isa (Eddie). The West team was RF (Faust), Shonen (Testament), N-Otoko (Venom), a Millia player, and the last person im not sure. At the point in which I started watching the finals, Haken had just defeated N-O if I am not mistaken. After that it was RF vs Haken. RF defeated Haken and then he proceeded to defeat 012. Then RF lost to FAB. FAB then lost to Shonen. Isa then defeated Shonen. Final match was Isa vs the Kansai Millia player and Isa once again represented the sheer power and brokeness of Eddie all too well, taking the tournament for an East Japan victory. It was very hype and noisy during the finals and there was just a lot of energy in the room. I got pretty excited as well. After the finals I pretty much had to leave right away since the train I needed to catch in order to get home was coming in a matter of minutes. I said goodbye to MIU and headed out.
On the way home I pretty much slept the entire 4 hours it took to get from Game Chariot to my train station... I was just exhausted. Next week there will be some tournament action going on somewhere in Tokyo. I forgot exactly where but Ill check my arcadia soon and make sure to go. This time I wont have game shows and concerts to attend so I can focus much more on Guilty Gear and should be able to play much better.
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
Top Player Infested Team Tournament Madness
This weekend started out with casuals at Akihabara on Friday night as most weekends often do. Ogawa and some other top players were there and I got some good games in. Nothing too noteworthy happened. After casuals I headed to Current. A few regulars were there but it wasn't anything out of the ordinary. At about 4:00 am I headed to GODZ for a beer but it was dead as hell. They played a few Symphony X songs for me which was cool. After that I left and went to sleep.
Saturday I headed back to Akihabara since there would be a 3 on 3 there today. As usual, I had no team in advance so I began going around and asking various people if they needed a team mate. After asking several people I finally found a HOS player named riri-burasuto (Lily-blast?) that had no team. Our 3rd team member was randomly assigned to us among the left over people by the Akihabara staff, he was an I-no player named Sesanichiko. There were tons of top players at this tournament so I knew it wasnt going to be easy. There were 14 teams total. I checked the brackets and our first match was against Osaka B's team. I dont know who the people on his team were since I think they were randomly placed with him but one was an Anji player and the other was a Slayer player. First match was I-no vs Anji, I-no wins. Next I-no loses to Slayer. Then HOS goes and beats Slayer. Next, HOS loses to Osaka B's Faust. I was assigned the position of anchor so I went last vs Osaka B. Things started off great. I took the first round and was playing well. 2nd and 3rd round were close but I made a few stupid execution mistakes and lost by a little bit. I played casuals for the rest of the time there. The winning team was Isa 012 and Machaboo. I stayed at Akihabara pretty late and played casuals. Ogawa showed up after the tourny was over and said hi. I only played him one time cuz I had a streak on the cabinet next to him for a while so I didnt really have much time to play him, he won. One notable victory I had was against Hakkutsoryuu's Faust. He had a 40 something win streak and I managed to end it. Eventually it got late so I left and headed back to Shinjuku.
That night at current was packed. There were a few guest DJs and lots of new people there as well as a few regulars. Anti (the guy from Finland) came with some of his friends and as he often does, offered me some tabacco that comes in a little pouch that you stick between your lip and gums (sorry, I dont know exactly what this is called, its not chew though). That stuff gives you a crazy buzz. He ended up giving me a whole pack of it since he had a bunch so I had like 3 of them and was buzzing pretty hard. I had a lot of beer and talked to various people. At the end of the night, Masami (one of the bar tenders) was cleaning up and someone had left a pack of cigarettes on the table and it was almost completely full. He offered it to me so I took it since lately ive been smoking a few here and there when I drink on the weekends. The cigarretes were called "Peter Jackson" which I found rather amusing. They were from Australia and the packaging was rather interesting. Appearently, in addition to the surgeon general warning that always appears on packs, in Australia they have a giant ugly picture of a pair of infected lungs with a warning message against lung cancer. Not very appealing at all. Throughout the rest of the weekend I still smoked the whole pack anyway though haha.
The next day I had a choice of either going to a tournament in Yokohama, or a 5 on5 at Shinjuku Sportsland. I sorta wanted to go to Yokohama since I had never been there, but Sportsland was a 5 minute walk from where I slept so I just said fuck it and went there. Plus I had never played in a 5 on 5 in Japan before so I wanted to see how that went. Before I had headed to Sportsland I went to Vegas first since its even closer to where I sleep and cheaper for pre tournament casuals, so there are often a good ammount of people at Vegas before Sportsland tournys. I played there for a good while and ended up getting like a 14 win streak until I eventually lost in a close match to an I-no player. I think I pretty much beat everyone in there at least once during my streak. I asked around a little to try and see if I could get a team going. There was a May player named Suumei who was playing on the cab next to me and I asked him if he needed a team mate. He said he had no team so we agreed to team up. Everyone else who was in there already had teams. Eventually in the middle of my streak the May player said he was going to Mikado to play (which is 1 minute walk from Vegas.... I heard from Chip that Mikado is closing down soon btw which is sad, it has a long history of good street fighter tournaments). After I lost my streak I headed over to Mikado to see what was up. I played against Suumay a few times and the most of the people that were at Vegas showed up at Mikado and I played a bit against them. Then after a while it was getting late so we all started to walk over to Sportsland together. On the way there, a few of the players were giving me props saying my Faust was strong and stuff and were asking about where I was from and everything. I humbly denied my Faust being strong and told them I was from Chicago and that Chicago had a lot of strong players. As usual they were very surprised to hear that the U.S. has barely any arcades and that we play on PS2 most of the time. Upon arriving at Sportsland the place was very packed. The tournament was pretty huge and there ended up being 13 teams (65 players) and just about every top player in Tokyo was there. I certainly picked the right tournament. During signups me and Suumay registered that we would be on the same team and the rest of our team was assigned by the staff among the leftovers. I dont remember all of their names but in addition to myself and May, our team consisted of Eddie, Johhny, and Baiken. I dont know who the people were that we fought, but our first match went like this. Eddie goes first against Axl and loses. Then May beats Axl. Then May loses to Potemkin. Then I go and lose to Potemkin as well. I suffered a brain fart and just got owned in the corner and just basically couldnt do anything. This Potemkin player was pretty solid and ended up beating the rest of our team by himself, I dont even know what other characters were on their team. I played casuals throughout the tournament occasionally watching a match here and there on the big screen. The finals were Isa's team vs Nemo's team. The finals were hype as hell, everyone was yelling all loud and shit, it felt like a fucking US Marvel tournament or something. Isa had Maruken and Zero on his team, I forgot who the others were. Nemo had this really great Chipp player on his team that ended up beaing most of Isa's team by himself but he lost to Isa and the final match was Isa vs Nemo with Isa coming out ahead for the win. So at this point Isa was 2 for 2 this weekend and was at the top of his game. I played casuals there for a bit longer and evetually was hungry so I went to get some food.
Instead of going back to Sportsland after eating I went to Vegas instead, predicting that most people would be doing the same due to lower prices. I was indeed correct and Vegas was packed. I played there for a while, there were lots of good players there. There was a really solid ABA player there that was beating a lot of good players. Kazuki lost to him a couple times. I lost to him a few times in very close matches but I eventually ended his win streak. I hate fighting ABA as I often feel so helpless against her. ABA combos seriously have to do the most damage in the whole game. Eventually at around 9:30 I decided I was going to head to Ikebukuro and try to go to this other rock bar called Paradise City that Chip was telling me about. Current is awsome but I felt like going somewhere new to mix it up a bit. As I was leaving, Osaka B left right after me and caught up with me and we walked to the train station together and had a good chat. He said he was going home. We talked about various things. He told me that my Faust was really strong and stuff but I told him I'm still not very strong yet. I asked him what matchups he has the most trouble with and he surprisingly said Slayer and Testament. While these characters are both extremely powerful, it seems (at least to me) that Faust has worse matchups. I told him I have the hardest time with May and Millia. I also asked him about his SBO team and as FAB had said, they are teaming up, but the Millia player on their team is actually Nakamura afterall.... so that team is gonna be pretty broken. I told him I didnt have a team yet but its cool cuz its still early. Eventually we got to the train platform and he started reaching in his bag and busted out a bag with a box of Japanese pound cake in it. He gave it to me as a gift for absoloutly no reason at all. Osaka B is a totally cool guy. I asked him if he wanted to go to the bar with me for some beers but he said he didnt drink alchohal and was tired and wanted to go home. When the train got to Ikebukuro I got off and said bye to Osaka B and told him id see him tomorrow at the Shinjuku Club Sega 3 on 3.
When I got to Ikebukuro I followed Chip's instructions on how to get to Paradise City. He said it was about a 5 minute walk from the west exit of the station. I walked around for a bit but couldnt find it. I emailed Chip on my phone to ask him how to get there. He called me back and gave me more details. After about a minute later he called me back again and told me he checked the bar's website and that they were closed tonight due to it being a holiday the next day. I thanked Chip and told him id see him in a few weeks since he would be leaving for San Fransisco for a few weeks for a business trip. Having wasted time walking around Ikebukuro I felt like playing more Guilty so I headed back to Shinjuku to play more at Vegas. There were less people there now but a few good players like Nakamura and FAB were still there playing. I got some more games in against various people and eventually everyone pretty much left so it was time to go drinking. I headed to Current since it was pretty much the best bet at this point.
When I got there there were a few people, a group of the Cirque guys, and a few others. I chatted with the Cirque guys and they eventually left, and then I spend most of the rest of the night talked with this girl named Mai and Mogi and Sushi (Curent staff). I decided to share the cake that Osaka B gave to me with everyone and it was good shit, they all enjoyed it. There were also these random Australians there on vacation. They were trying to take a group picture with the staff and I offered to take the picture for them so they could all be in it. Their camera was all messed up and the memory was full and the flash settings were all screwed up so it came out semi blurry. Then they were trying to take another picture later and I offered to to it again but one of the guys made a rude comment along the lines of "thats ok we want it to come out clear this time". Jerk off. When they were ready to leave, the girlfriend of the jerkoff dude wanted to keep drinking. She was pretty wasted and it took a lot of convicing by her boyfriend that it was time to leave. Eventually after a lot of bitching from the girl and negative comments and pouting towards her boyfriend they managed leave. Sushi seemed releaved when they left haha. After that... me, Sushi, Mogi, and Mai were the only ones there. We talked for a bit and Sushi told me that tomorrow they would be closed for the first time in a while. I asked him what he would do with his day off. He said to me in English, "I will wake up, then I will fucking alone. Then I will make breakfast.... and then fucking alone. Then I will watch TV... and then fucking alone. Then I will go shopping and then come home and... fucking alone. Then before sleep I will fucking alone". Each time he said fucking alone, he made the up down motion with his fist hahah. I guess he doesnt know the word "masturbate." It was the funniest shit ever. He was just joking and said how he actually had real plans that day with his father who was coming to visit, but he said he would probably "fucking alone" anyway haha. Eventually it was time to go, they thanked me for always drinking there and I said goodbye to them all and headed out. Got some drunken curry and went to sleep.
The next day I woke up and went to Club Sega Shinjuku for the 3 on 3. When I arrived there werent many people there yet. I played a game of casuals against this one Dizzy player. I beat him 3 rounds in a row and the last round was a perfect ended by me dizzying him and taunting into a forward HS. After that he played me again and I proceeded to beat him 3 rounds again ending it with another perfect. This guy wasnt that bad but I was just in his head. After losing the 2nd time he SLAMMED the cabinet really fucking hard and stormed off. He didnt stay for the tournament hah. Eventually more people arrived and it got pretty packed. MIU was there working as I knew he would be. I had no team once again so I signed up on the extra person list. I thanked Osaka B again for the cake and told him I shared it with some friends and it was tasty. After playing casuals for a bit, MIU called over all the people who needed teams. There was a 2 person team consisting of a Millia player named R-1 and Basara the Slayer player. MIU asked R-1 to choose their 3rd person among the list of extras and much to my surprise he chose me. I guess either the rest of the players were shitty or he actually recognized me as being a good player. MIU then asked me to make a team name. I couldnt think of anything, but all weekend I was getting lots of posative reactions towards the Street Fighter II hoodie I was wearing (even when I was at Current everyone kept getting all excited when they saw the shirt and were acting out random SF specials moves haha) and MIU and R-1 thought it was pretty awsome so they named our team something along the lines of "this shirt is great." I was pretty excited about this team because both of those guys were solid players. Once again this tournament was packed with top players. There were 14 teams. Our first match was against a team of Anji, Testament, May. I dont know who they were but the May player was a purple May who I see around often and Im pretty sure hes one of the top Mays from SBO. We lost RPS so we had to choose our first player. R-1 and Basara elected me to go first. I went first against Anji and won. Then I went against Testament and won again. Up next was May. I was doing surprisingly well since I fuckin hate May and this guy was really good. I won the first round. 2nd round was close but I lost. 3rd round I almost won... he had about 5% health left but I went down unfortunately. I was pretty posative that my team mates would be able to beat May but much to my dissapointment, both Basara and R-1 lost to May as well resulting in what was one hit away from being an OCV by me turning into a reverse OCV by May. I was pretty bummed since I had expected this team to do better but I guess thats how it goes. There were some pretty broken teams at this tournament, including Osaka B, Nakamura, FAB (their SBO team), as well as Isa, Nemo, Imo. I thought for sure that Isa, Nemo, Imo would win it after I saw them win against Osaka B's team, but in the end they actually lost to Haaken's team (I dont remember who else was on it) in the finals. I played casuals for a while after the tourny but was starting to feel pretty tired but did alright for the most part. I managed to beat Zero's HOS which was cool. One thing I found surprising was Basara was playing Sol in casuals and his Sol was really good. It actually reminded me of Juicy G's Sol, probably the most similar to it out of any Japanese Sol's ive played. He beat the same May player with his Sol pretty easily, but seemed to have trouble with his Slayer. In addition I was beating his Slayer easier than his Sol... and I know the Sol matchup probably the best in the whole game. I wonder why he just doesnt play Sol instead of Slayer. Eventually it was time to go so I headed out and played some DS on the train ride home. When transfering trains at Takasaki I ran into Amy, one of the other ALTs who lives in my town. We had a chat for a bit about skiiing and other various things.
Thats about it for this week. It was a lot of fun and the competition was fierce as hell all weekend. Next weekend I will go to AOU to try out SFIV and BlazBlue followed by an Iron Maiden concert in Chiba. Sunday I will most likely play in a Guilty Gear tournament... maybe the one at Game Chariot or something.
Saturday I headed back to Akihabara since there would be a 3 on 3 there today. As usual, I had no team in advance so I began going around and asking various people if they needed a team mate. After asking several people I finally found a HOS player named riri-burasuto (Lily-blast?) that had no team. Our 3rd team member was randomly assigned to us among the left over people by the Akihabara staff, he was an I-no player named Sesanichiko. There were tons of top players at this tournament so I knew it wasnt going to be easy. There were 14 teams total. I checked the brackets and our first match was against Osaka B's team. I dont know who the people on his team were since I think they were randomly placed with him but one was an Anji player and the other was a Slayer player. First match was I-no vs Anji, I-no wins. Next I-no loses to Slayer. Then HOS goes and beats Slayer. Next, HOS loses to Osaka B's Faust. I was assigned the position of anchor so I went last vs Osaka B. Things started off great. I took the first round and was playing well. 2nd and 3rd round were close but I made a few stupid execution mistakes and lost by a little bit. I played casuals for the rest of the time there. The winning team was Isa 012 and Machaboo. I stayed at Akihabara pretty late and played casuals. Ogawa showed up after the tourny was over and said hi. I only played him one time cuz I had a streak on the cabinet next to him for a while so I didnt really have much time to play him, he won. One notable victory I had was against Hakkutsoryuu's Faust. He had a 40 something win streak and I managed to end it. Eventually it got late so I left and headed back to Shinjuku.
That night at current was packed. There were a few guest DJs and lots of new people there as well as a few regulars. Anti (the guy from Finland) came with some of his friends and as he often does, offered me some tabacco that comes in a little pouch that you stick between your lip and gums (sorry, I dont know exactly what this is called, its not chew though). That stuff gives you a crazy buzz. He ended up giving me a whole pack of it since he had a bunch so I had like 3 of them and was buzzing pretty hard. I had a lot of beer and talked to various people. At the end of the night, Masami (one of the bar tenders) was cleaning up and someone had left a pack of cigarettes on the table and it was almost completely full. He offered it to me so I took it since lately ive been smoking a few here and there when I drink on the weekends. The cigarretes were called "Peter Jackson" which I found rather amusing. They were from Australia and the packaging was rather interesting. Appearently, in addition to the surgeon general warning that always appears on packs, in Australia they have a giant ugly picture of a pair of infected lungs with a warning message against lung cancer. Not very appealing at all. Throughout the rest of the weekend I still smoked the whole pack anyway though haha.
The next day I had a choice of either going to a tournament in Yokohama, or a 5 on5 at Shinjuku Sportsland. I sorta wanted to go to Yokohama since I had never been there, but Sportsland was a 5 minute walk from where I slept so I just said fuck it and went there. Plus I had never played in a 5 on 5 in Japan before so I wanted to see how that went. Before I had headed to Sportsland I went to Vegas first since its even closer to where I sleep and cheaper for pre tournament casuals, so there are often a good ammount of people at Vegas before Sportsland tournys. I played there for a good while and ended up getting like a 14 win streak until I eventually lost in a close match to an I-no player. I think I pretty much beat everyone in there at least once during my streak. I asked around a little to try and see if I could get a team going. There was a May player named Suumei who was playing on the cab next to me and I asked him if he needed a team mate. He said he had no team so we agreed to team up. Everyone else who was in there already had teams. Eventually in the middle of my streak the May player said he was going to Mikado to play (which is 1 minute walk from Vegas.... I heard from Chip that Mikado is closing down soon btw which is sad, it has a long history of good street fighter tournaments). After I lost my streak I headed over to Mikado to see what was up. I played against Suumay a few times and the most of the people that were at Vegas showed up at Mikado and I played a bit against them. Then after a while it was getting late so we all started to walk over to Sportsland together. On the way there, a few of the players were giving me props saying my Faust was strong and stuff and were asking about where I was from and everything. I humbly denied my Faust being strong and told them I was from Chicago and that Chicago had a lot of strong players. As usual they were very surprised to hear that the U.S. has barely any arcades and that we play on PS2 most of the time. Upon arriving at Sportsland the place was very packed. The tournament was pretty huge and there ended up being 13 teams (65 players) and just about every top player in Tokyo was there. I certainly picked the right tournament. During signups me and Suumay registered that we would be on the same team and the rest of our team was assigned by the staff among the leftovers. I dont remember all of their names but in addition to myself and May, our team consisted of Eddie, Johhny, and Baiken. I dont know who the people were that we fought, but our first match went like this. Eddie goes first against Axl and loses. Then May beats Axl. Then May loses to Potemkin. Then I go and lose to Potemkin as well. I suffered a brain fart and just got owned in the corner and just basically couldnt do anything. This Potemkin player was pretty solid and ended up beating the rest of our team by himself, I dont even know what other characters were on their team. I played casuals throughout the tournament occasionally watching a match here and there on the big screen. The finals were Isa's team vs Nemo's team. The finals were hype as hell, everyone was yelling all loud and shit, it felt like a fucking US Marvel tournament or something. Isa had Maruken and Zero on his team, I forgot who the others were. Nemo had this really great Chipp player on his team that ended up beaing most of Isa's team by himself but he lost to Isa and the final match was Isa vs Nemo with Isa coming out ahead for the win. So at this point Isa was 2 for 2 this weekend and was at the top of his game. I played casuals there for a bit longer and evetually was hungry so I went to get some food.
Instead of going back to Sportsland after eating I went to Vegas instead, predicting that most people would be doing the same due to lower prices. I was indeed correct and Vegas was packed. I played there for a while, there were lots of good players there. There was a really solid ABA player there that was beating a lot of good players. Kazuki lost to him a couple times. I lost to him a few times in very close matches but I eventually ended his win streak. I hate fighting ABA as I often feel so helpless against her. ABA combos seriously have to do the most damage in the whole game. Eventually at around 9:30 I decided I was going to head to Ikebukuro and try to go to this other rock bar called Paradise City that Chip was telling me about. Current is awsome but I felt like going somewhere new to mix it up a bit. As I was leaving, Osaka B left right after me and caught up with me and we walked to the train station together and had a good chat. He said he was going home. We talked about various things. He told me that my Faust was really strong and stuff but I told him I'm still not very strong yet. I asked him what matchups he has the most trouble with and he surprisingly said Slayer and Testament. While these characters are both extremely powerful, it seems (at least to me) that Faust has worse matchups. I told him I have the hardest time with May and Millia. I also asked him about his SBO team and as FAB had said, they are teaming up, but the Millia player on their team is actually Nakamura afterall.... so that team is gonna be pretty broken. I told him I didnt have a team yet but its cool cuz its still early. Eventually we got to the train platform and he started reaching in his bag and busted out a bag with a box of Japanese pound cake in it. He gave it to me as a gift for absoloutly no reason at all. Osaka B is a totally cool guy. I asked him if he wanted to go to the bar with me for some beers but he said he didnt drink alchohal and was tired and wanted to go home. When the train got to Ikebukuro I got off and said bye to Osaka B and told him id see him tomorrow at the Shinjuku Club Sega 3 on 3.
When I got to Ikebukuro I followed Chip's instructions on how to get to Paradise City. He said it was about a 5 minute walk from the west exit of the station. I walked around for a bit but couldnt find it. I emailed Chip on my phone to ask him how to get there. He called me back and gave me more details. After about a minute later he called me back again and told me he checked the bar's website and that they were closed tonight due to it being a holiday the next day. I thanked Chip and told him id see him in a few weeks since he would be leaving for San Fransisco for a few weeks for a business trip. Having wasted time walking around Ikebukuro I felt like playing more Guilty so I headed back to Shinjuku to play more at Vegas. There were less people there now but a few good players like Nakamura and FAB were still there playing. I got some more games in against various people and eventually everyone pretty much left so it was time to go drinking. I headed to Current since it was pretty much the best bet at this point.
When I got there there were a few people, a group of the Cirque guys, and a few others. I chatted with the Cirque guys and they eventually left, and then I spend most of the rest of the night talked with this girl named Mai and Mogi and Sushi (Curent staff). I decided to share the cake that Osaka B gave to me with everyone and it was good shit, they all enjoyed it. There were also these random Australians there on vacation. They were trying to take a group picture with the staff and I offered to take the picture for them so they could all be in it. Their camera was all messed up and the memory was full and the flash settings were all screwed up so it came out semi blurry. Then they were trying to take another picture later and I offered to to it again but one of the guys made a rude comment along the lines of "thats ok we want it to come out clear this time". Jerk off. When they were ready to leave, the girlfriend of the jerkoff dude wanted to keep drinking. She was pretty wasted and it took a lot of convicing by her boyfriend that it was time to leave. Eventually after a lot of bitching from the girl and negative comments and pouting towards her boyfriend they managed leave. Sushi seemed releaved when they left haha. After that... me, Sushi, Mogi, and Mai were the only ones there. We talked for a bit and Sushi told me that tomorrow they would be closed for the first time in a while. I asked him what he would do with his day off. He said to me in English, "I will wake up, then I will fucking alone. Then I will make breakfast.... and then fucking alone. Then I will watch TV... and then fucking alone. Then I will go shopping and then come home and... fucking alone. Then before sleep I will fucking alone". Each time he said fucking alone, he made the up down motion with his fist hahah. I guess he doesnt know the word "masturbate." It was the funniest shit ever. He was just joking and said how he actually had real plans that day with his father who was coming to visit, but he said he would probably "fucking alone" anyway haha. Eventually it was time to go, they thanked me for always drinking there and I said goodbye to them all and headed out. Got some drunken curry and went to sleep.
The next day I woke up and went to Club Sega Shinjuku for the 3 on 3. When I arrived there werent many people there yet. I played a game of casuals against this one Dizzy player. I beat him 3 rounds in a row and the last round was a perfect ended by me dizzying him and taunting into a forward HS. After that he played me again and I proceeded to beat him 3 rounds again ending it with another perfect. This guy wasnt that bad but I was just in his head. After losing the 2nd time he SLAMMED the cabinet really fucking hard and stormed off. He didnt stay for the tournament hah. Eventually more people arrived and it got pretty packed. MIU was there working as I knew he would be. I had no team once again so I signed up on the extra person list. I thanked Osaka B again for the cake and told him I shared it with some friends and it was tasty. After playing casuals for a bit, MIU called over all the people who needed teams. There was a 2 person team consisting of a Millia player named R-1 and Basara the Slayer player. MIU asked R-1 to choose their 3rd person among the list of extras and much to my surprise he chose me. I guess either the rest of the players were shitty or he actually recognized me as being a good player. MIU then asked me to make a team name. I couldnt think of anything, but all weekend I was getting lots of posative reactions towards the Street Fighter II hoodie I was wearing (even when I was at Current everyone kept getting all excited when they saw the shirt and were acting out random SF specials moves haha) and MIU and R-1 thought it was pretty awsome so they named our team something along the lines of "this shirt is great." I was pretty excited about this team because both of those guys were solid players. Once again this tournament was packed with top players. There were 14 teams. Our first match was against a team of Anji, Testament, May. I dont know who they were but the May player was a purple May who I see around often and Im pretty sure hes one of the top Mays from SBO. We lost RPS so we had to choose our first player. R-1 and Basara elected me to go first. I went first against Anji and won. Then I went against Testament and won again. Up next was May. I was doing surprisingly well since I fuckin hate May and this guy was really good. I won the first round. 2nd round was close but I lost. 3rd round I almost won... he had about 5% health left but I went down unfortunately. I was pretty posative that my team mates would be able to beat May but much to my dissapointment, both Basara and R-1 lost to May as well resulting in what was one hit away from being an OCV by me turning into a reverse OCV by May. I was pretty bummed since I had expected this team to do better but I guess thats how it goes. There were some pretty broken teams at this tournament, including Osaka B, Nakamura, FAB (their SBO team), as well as Isa, Nemo, Imo. I thought for sure that Isa, Nemo, Imo would win it after I saw them win against Osaka B's team, but in the end they actually lost to Haaken's team (I dont remember who else was on it) in the finals. I played casuals for a while after the tourny but was starting to feel pretty tired but did alright for the most part. I managed to beat Zero's HOS which was cool. One thing I found surprising was Basara was playing Sol in casuals and his Sol was really good. It actually reminded me of Juicy G's Sol, probably the most similar to it out of any Japanese Sol's ive played. He beat the same May player with his Sol pretty easily, but seemed to have trouble with his Slayer. In addition I was beating his Slayer easier than his Sol... and I know the Sol matchup probably the best in the whole game. I wonder why he just doesnt play Sol instead of Slayer. Eventually it was time to go so I headed out and played some DS on the train ride home. When transfering trains at Takasaki I ran into Amy, one of the other ALTs who lives in my town. We had a chat for a bit about skiiing and other various things.
Thats about it for this week. It was a lot of fun and the competition was fierce as hell all weekend. Next weekend I will go to AOU to try out SFIV and BlazBlue followed by an Iron Maiden concert in Chiba. Sunday I will most likely play in a Guilty Gear tournament... maybe the one at Game Chariot or something.
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