Kyoto recap
Two of my elementary school students showed up at my front door this morning. I guess they were thrown off that I was answering the door in my pyjamas at noon, because they wouldn't say anything and just stood there looking nervous until I said goodbye and went back inside. That's a still a step up from Jehovah's Witnesses and NHK people, I guess.
My trip to Kyoto was lots of fun. It's really not a city you can see properly in two days, but I hit most of the places I wanted to see. The first day I visited Nijo Castle, the International Manga Museum, and Gion Corner, with a brief stop to go shopping in between. I met a nice couple from Canada at the manga museum who had just moved to Japan. The museum was hosting an Astroboy movie promo (15 minutes of dubbed footage I mostly understood, and the first episode of the original Astroboy anime), so I hung out with them for a while to watch that. Gion Corner is a touristy geisha-spotting area, and I mostly went for the Japanese culture demonstration they have every evening. Tea ceremony, koto music, court dancing, stuff like that. The puppet show was pretty cool. If a human-sized marionette that takes three people to operate still counts as a 'puppet'.
The second day was a bit of shrine-hopping. I went to the Fushimi Inari shrine, which was absolutely amazing and awesome. The entire trail up the mountain is lined with torii gates, so walking the train is like walking through a red-pillar tunnel. There's also legends about fox possession (foxes being the messengers of Inari), but I'm fairly sure I escaped without needing an exorcism. I kind of wish I'd stayed there longer, because the other shrine I visited - Kiyomizu - was insanely crowded. It was nice and all, but the only thing that really made it worth the trip was the visit to the basement of the main shrine. You go down a staircase, and end up walking through a tunnel in total darkness. I don't think I've ever been in a place that dark before. Eventually you come across a dimly lit stone with things carved onto it, but the experience itself was the coolest part. The rest of the shrine was mostly just your standard temple fare, plus some "love rocks" and creepy looking giant rabbit statues.
After I left the shrine, I stopped by a big handicraft centre that had some hands-on activities. I tried out the damascene stuff, and got a keychain out of it. The real highlight of the evening was when I headed through the shopping district, though. While I was looking for somewhere to eat dinner, I discovered this place: Ninja Restaurant & Labyrinth. The restaurant with waiters dressed as ninjas. I went looking for the Tokyo location once, and (appropriately enough) couldn't find it, so I stopped into the café portion of the restaurant, "Sweets of Ninja". I had the white frog cheesecake. I'm not sure what white frogs have to do with ninjas, but it was good. A+, would ninja again.
One of the things I love about travelling is finding places off the beaten path. There was a very small, very tucked away, very eclectically decorated café near my hotel that I might put up some pictures of later. Perfect place to sit down for a while after walking around all day, have some tea, and watch some incredibly cheesy old giant monster movies that they had playing on the TV.
I bought the PC version of Bioshock while I was home during the summer, and I finished in a few weeks ago. It's a game I've been wanting to play for a while, and after finishing System Shock 2, it seemed like as good a time as any to jump in.
I have to jump on the bandwagon and say that, yes, it's a great game.
Not a perfect one, mind. It's piss easy, fairly linear, and it does play like a severely dumbed down bastard child of System Shock 2 and Fallout. Unlike the System Shock or Thief games, the difficulty curve and scariness flatlines about halfway through. Once you get used to respawning every time you die, max out all your health items and ammo, and figure out how to exploit security cameras and invisibility, there's not a whole lot of challenges left. But all that can be excused for (1) great presentation and (2) a fantastic story, and Bioshock has both.
It's easy to make a game look pretty these days, but it's much harder to make a game world come to life. Bioshock does. Exploring the city of Rapture is terrifying and beautiful at the same time, and it's a joy to explore even when screaming mutants are running out of the darkness and lodging a sickle in your eye. The voice acting is top notch, and the soundtrack proves that perky 1940s music and the horror genre go hand-in-hand. Even towards the end, when you're so beefed up with weapons and superpowers that even Big Daddy isn't scary any more, the game still manages to hit you on a psychological level with some incredibly fucked up - and occasionally, incredibly sad - moments that prove the power of a well-placed ghostly vision or scribbled message on a wall to affect the player in ways that difficulty settings and monsters can't.
I'll also give the game credit for its storyline. The story keeps its momentum from beginning to end, and it's nicely split between unravelling what happened to the city, how your main character fits into things, and the origin of Rapture's more er, notable residents. A lot of the "big reveals" won't be a huge shock if you pay attention during the game, but it's just done so damn well that some occasional predictability didn't matter to me. As I explored each area of Rapture and learned more about the city and its denizens, I found that I didn't care how many things seemed lifted from System Shock, Fallout, Lost, or whatever. For everything the game borrows, it mixes it all up with enough originality and clever twists to make it its own. (Pay attention, Heroes. If you're going to lift ideas, this is how you do it.)
In the end, Bioshock is all about the presentation. It's not particularly a challenging game; you can easily breeze through it in a couple of days, and even first-time FPS players probably won't find it difficult. But the strength of its story, setting, and detail is where it shines. If you enjoy those things enough to let them carry you all the way through, it's well worth the price of admission.
My trip to Kyoto was lots of fun. It's really not a city you can see properly in two days, but I hit most of the places I wanted to see. The first day I visited Nijo Castle, the International Manga Museum, and Gion Corner, with a brief stop to go shopping in between. I met a nice couple from Canada at the manga museum who had just moved to Japan. The museum was hosting an Astroboy movie promo (15 minutes of dubbed footage I mostly understood, and the first episode of the original Astroboy anime), so I hung out with them for a while to watch that. Gion Corner is a touristy geisha-spotting area, and I mostly went for the Japanese culture demonstration they have every evening. Tea ceremony, koto music, court dancing, stuff like that. The puppet show was pretty cool. If a human-sized marionette that takes three people to operate still counts as a 'puppet'.
The second day was a bit of shrine-hopping. I went to the Fushimi Inari shrine, which was absolutely amazing and awesome. The entire trail up the mountain is lined with torii gates, so walking the train is like walking through a red-pillar tunnel. There's also legends about fox possession (foxes being the messengers of Inari), but I'm fairly sure I escaped without needing an exorcism. I kind of wish I'd stayed there longer, because the other shrine I visited - Kiyomizu - was insanely crowded. It was nice and all, but the only thing that really made it worth the trip was the visit to the basement of the main shrine. You go down a staircase, and end up walking through a tunnel in total darkness. I don't think I've ever been in a place that dark before. Eventually you come across a dimly lit stone with things carved onto it, but the experience itself was the coolest part. The rest of the shrine was mostly just your standard temple fare, plus some "love rocks" and creepy looking giant rabbit statues.
After I left the shrine, I stopped by a big handicraft centre that had some hands-on activities. I tried out the damascene stuff, and got a keychain out of it. The real highlight of the evening was when I headed through the shopping district, though. While I was looking for somewhere to eat dinner, I discovered this place: Ninja Restaurant & Labyrinth. The restaurant with waiters dressed as ninjas. I went looking for the Tokyo location once, and (appropriately enough) couldn't find it, so I stopped into the café portion of the restaurant, "Sweets of Ninja". I had the white frog cheesecake. I'm not sure what white frogs have to do with ninjas, but it was good. A+, would ninja again.
One of the things I love about travelling is finding places off the beaten path. There was a very small, very tucked away, very eclectically decorated café near my hotel that I might put up some pictures of later. Perfect place to sit down for a while after walking around all day, have some tea, and watch some incredibly cheesy old giant monster movies that they had playing on the TV.
I bought the PC version of Bioshock while I was home during the summer, and I finished in a few weeks ago. It's a game I've been wanting to play for a while, and after finishing System Shock 2, it seemed like as good a time as any to jump in.
I have to jump on the bandwagon and say that, yes, it's a great game.
Not a perfect one, mind. It's piss easy, fairly linear, and it does play like a severely dumbed down bastard child of System Shock 2 and Fallout. Unlike the System Shock or Thief games, the difficulty curve and scariness flatlines about halfway through. Once you get used to respawning every time you die, max out all your health items and ammo, and figure out how to exploit security cameras and invisibility, there's not a whole lot of challenges left. But all that can be excused for (1) great presentation and (2) a fantastic story, and Bioshock has both.
It's easy to make a game look pretty these days, but it's much harder to make a game world come to life. Bioshock does. Exploring the city of Rapture is terrifying and beautiful at the same time, and it's a joy to explore even when screaming mutants are running out of the darkness and lodging a sickle in your eye. The voice acting is top notch, and the soundtrack proves that perky 1940s music and the horror genre go hand-in-hand. Even towards the end, when you're so beefed up with weapons and superpowers that even Big Daddy isn't scary any more, the game still manages to hit you on a psychological level with some incredibly fucked up - and occasionally, incredibly sad - moments that prove the power of a well-placed ghostly vision or scribbled message on a wall to affect the player in ways that difficulty settings and monsters can't.
I'll also give the game credit for its storyline. The story keeps its momentum from beginning to end, and it's nicely split between unravelling what happened to the city, how your main character fits into things, and the origin of Rapture's more er, notable residents. A lot of the "big reveals" won't be a huge shock if you pay attention during the game, but it's just done so damn well that some occasional predictability didn't matter to me. As I explored each area of Rapture and learned more about the city and its denizens, I found that I didn't care how many things seemed lifted from System Shock, Fallout, Lost, or whatever. For everything the game borrows, it mixes it all up with enough originality and clever twists to make it its own. (Pay attention, Heroes. If you're going to lift ideas, this is how you do it.)
In the end, Bioshock is all about the presentation. It's not particularly a challenging game; you can easily breeze through it in a couple of days, and even first-time FPS players probably won't find it difficult. But the strength of its story, setting, and detail is where it shines. If you enjoy those things enough to let them carry you all the way through, it's well worth the price of admission.