Fanbases Ruining Games For Me

You may think that title is a bit strange but it's something that happens to me quite often and it's a shame because usually the thing I end up hating ends up actually being quite good.  The problem is that my stubbornness to not be associate with the legions of twats kicks in and I end up nitpicking every little problem I can find with a given title or series and I convince myself it's shit.

This happened pretty hard with Final Fantasy 7, a game I got when I was quite young and loved the fuck out of it.  I'd play it for hours a day, multiple play throughs and even talk about it at length every day for weeks at school with my friends.  Then I got my hands on an internet connection and discovered a whole bunch of annoying twats that started to make me hate it.

It was a slow process.  First I found all the twats on forums and sites like GameFAQs or I'd see read some cringe worthy fanfiction and have to stay away from the computer for a few days to recover.  But I'd still play the game and enjoy it, their shittiness didn't affect the quality of the game after all.  But then I stopped playing it and eventually my memories of the game started to fade away and me being me the things I remembered most were the things that I had problems with.  Then large groups of twats would come along and brand it "THE GREATEST RPG EVER MADE!" or you'd play a game and there would be some 13 year old boy with XxSephiroth007xX as his username and eventually I'd end up hating it.

Then in 2010 I got over myself I replayed Final Fantasy 7 and.....loved the fuck out of it the same way I always did.  It's happened to lots of other things as well such as Kingdom Hearts and Halo with both communities being filled with the largest know-nothing sacks of shit to every curse a keyboard with their greasy hands and while neither of those games are bad there mere mention of it in conversation makes me roll my eyes and sparks thoughts of suicide.  Kingdom Hearts fans with their "2Deep4U" shit and Halo fans who will be OUTRAGED if you claim that Halo has always been a mediocre shooter that ruined the genre and the idea of sharing a common interest with these people makes me sick.

It even happens in other fucking mediums too

Attack on Titan, a big popular anime in Japan that seems to have garnered a pretty big western following I  think is a show that I've never watched but I fucking HATE IT.  It seems like an interesting premise but back when it was fairly new there were a large number of cockrockets on my Facebook feed posting shit like "LOOK AT HOW ADULT IT IS!" with a screenshot of someone being bitten in half.

Violence doesn't make an anime adult, you can't just look at a scene of someone being eaten and claim that's what sets it apart from anime who's target audience is school children.  I have a better argument, it's published by fucking Kodansha so OF COURSE it's not adult, it's just shonen trash.

That said, if I watched it I'd probably get a kick out of it because shonen trash does tend to be sort of entertaining in a mindless way where you can just admire the spectacle of some insane shit going down.  I can't ever bring myself to actually watch it though because alone I cant justify spending my time like that and with friends I'd just be nitpicking and pissing them all off.  So thanks Titan fans, you ruined that show for me forever.

I'm sure one day I'll get over it give it ago but until then there's a lot of things that are being ruined for me by twats.

Used Games: Japan and England

Gaming is a pretty expensive hobby, or at least it can be if you want to stay completely up to date with the latest stuff.  To offset the strain on ones wallet, people like to buy games used rather than new since the used price is obviously going to be a bit cheaper than brand new.

What I'm basically trying to say in a really long winded way is that I have bought a lot of used games over the years.  A lot of those used games in the last couple have been from Japanese stores that sell retro stuff like NES and Super NES games.  Since coming here and dealing with the used game market in Japan, it's quite clear that Japanese people (generally speaking) take WAYYYY better care of their shit than they do in the UK.

I bought so much shit in the UK that didn't work that I almost developed a fucking phobia of buying games used from GAME or CEX, the condition of some of those discs was fucking atrocious.  I still remember one time during my teenage years I bought a used copy of Shadow of Memories on PS2

I took that shit home, opened up the box and I shit you not, the fucking bottom of the disc was fucking COVERED in Jam (that's Jelly for you Americans).  I mean how the fuck did that even get taken by the store in that condition and HOW THE FUCK did no one in the store think to clean/test the disc before they took it?! 

Needless to say I cleaned the shit out of that disc but even when I took the jam off it, it still didn't function.  What makes this story even worse is that I swear to God I know the guy who traded it in because he is the only guy on earth that has the capacity to smear a game in jam and not give a fuck about it when he goes to trade it in.

There have been other examples of this shit too, like when I bought a copy of Kingdom Hearts new and GAME tried to fob me off with a used copy.  When I took it home the game would fucking freeze when leaving the first island so I had to take that shit back and get it traded for an actual new copy like I fucking paid for.

Then there was that one time I bought a old PC game from a Gamestation in Manchester called Pool of Radiance.  I got home and opened the box and there was a different fucking game in there called P.O.D

The icing on the shit cake with that one was that when I took it back to the store, they didn't have any copies of Pool of Radiance left!  Of course I didn't want to just give up on that damn game so I ended up spending £10 more getting another copy from a different shop and when I eventually did get to play it, I remember thinking that it was a bit shit.  Still though, I wasn't very good at DnD style RPGs back then, so I'd like to hunt it down and try again at least.

Let's contrast this with Japan

That is a copy of Metal Gear Solid for PS1 that my friend got from a used book store.  The discs were immaculate, not a single blemish on them at all.  The demo of Suikoden on the bottom there was also immaculate.  Just to top it all off, it even came with a sheet of fucking stickers in PERFECT condition, it's as if the previous owner didn't even open the fucking thing the condition was so good.

Hell, just take another look at my new retro haul video

In that video I show a copy of a game called Sangokushi 4.  The game is fucking boxed with all the little pamphlets and the manual in absolute perfect condition.  On top of that the game came with the original fucking map that looked like it hadn't even been touched and this thing only cost me like 200 fucking yen.  If something in that kind of condition was available in a UK store it would be priced out the arse.

On top of that, in my local retro store I have seen the staff taking the old cartridges off the shelf so that they can clean them and put them in new plastic wrapping.  When I say clean, I don't just mean they give the underside a blow and then re-wrap them, I mean they properly get the fuck in there and give them a good clean and test before putting them back on the shelf.

I mean Japan isn't perfect, they do tend to overprice on a lot of shit, especially in these specialist retro stores.  Like the other day I found Silent Hill for 1500 yen, but a few months prior my friend had found another copy in a different store for 500 yen.  You really have to be careful not to get totally ripped off when buying retro games in Japan.

Still though, Japan is way better than England when it comes to dealing with and purchasing used games.  Fucking sort your shit out England

Why Japanese karaoke is awesome

Well I went an missed another blog post again because I went out, spent 6 hours inside a Karaoke booth and then followed it up by seeing a movie that was just recently released called Helter Skelter.

Helter Skelter will get its own post later, but for now, I wanted to do something short letting everyone know about the joys of Karaoke in Japan.

For any readers who don't know how this shit works over here, it's very simple.  In England, most karaoke is done in pubs and bars, where you have to get up in front of a whole buildings worth of people and sing a song.   This immediately turns some people off as they get nervous singing in front of so many onlookers.  However in Japan, they have these huge buildings filled with little rooms, and you rent out one of these rooms with your buddies and just have a grand old time with people that you feel comfortable with.

I would just like to point out, that above picture is not from one of my local karaoke places.  I lifted it off some other dudes blog after a quick image search, but it's a chain called Big Echo and they all look exactly the fucking same anyway.

"But Tau, this is a gaming blog, why the fuck are you talking about singing goddamn pop songs?!"

Well let me fuckin' tell you!  Inside the data banks of the various types of karaoke machines in Japan, there is a shit ton of video game and anime music.  I barely watch anime, but some of my standard go to songs when I'm out at Karaoke are Suteki da Ne (FFX), Real Emotion (FFX-2 English AND Japanese), Hikari/Simple and Clean (Kingdom hearts) as well as a shit ton of other assorted video game tracks.

But then what really blew my mind, was this!

That's right! They had fuckin' Snake Eater from MGS3!  Not only is this one of the best video game songs EVER FUCKIN' WRITTEN, but nothing feels more awesome than blasting this out at karaoke, while the video shows clips of Snake being a badass in the background.

THAT people, is why Japanese karaoke is FUCKIN' AWESOME!

UPDATE: It's not a big echo in the picture, its a Karaoke Kan, they are all so tightly packed in Nagoya I thought they were the same thing.  THE MORE YA KNOW!