One benefit of staying in a ryokan is that you get both dinner and breakfast, so after sleeping in almost until the last minute, I was awakened by softlykarou with exactly enough time to make it to breakfast after a quick shower. And such a breakfast:


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Woke up early again, though not as early as softlykarou, who woke up in a panic at 1 a.m. worrying that she had somehow screwed up the hotel reservations and then couldn't get back to sleep. I woke up at 5:30 when she came back in from her morning run and then likewise couldn't get back to sleep, so after trying a failing for a while, I got up and met the ( Read more... )

We woke up at various points from "before dawn" to "early morning" and eventually all made our way down to the cafe across the street from the hotel, where we took advantage of the ¥350 all-you-can-eat breakfast. It was super simple--coffee and tea, bread and butter, and soup of the day--but six of us ate it and the seventh got beef curry while we ( Read more... )

This is the 11th year since I started going to ACEN and the 10th year since I started going with softlykarou. She couldn't make the first year because of a small convention she was running at Knox College, but she came the year after and every year we've gone since, which is all of them except 2009-2011 (when we were in Japan) and 2013 (when we had no money ( Read more... )

Last night was the final session of the short Warlords of the Mushroom King game I ran, and almost the entire session was a battle with the Super Mario Galaxy 2 Bowser Music playing in the background. That sounds like a nightmare, but we run relatively short sessions and got a bit of a later start, to a combat with nine major characters--the ( Read more... )

Last night was another session of the Warlords of the Mushroom Kingdom short-run game I'm doing. There was another session in between this one and the first one I wrote about, but I didn't have anything insightful to say about it and I'm not going to do a blow-by-blow recounting of this game, so I skipped it ( Read more... )

Imagine the perfect NES game. A game with the tight controls and world map of Super Mario Brothers III, the variable weapon choices and themed bosses of Mega Man, the item design of Castlevania, and the bounding pogo jumps and treasure hunting of Duck Tales. Imagine that it could be made for modern systems and wouldn't be bound by NES limitations ( Read more... )

I tend to write pretty detailed posts about my vacations because even though they're mostly only of interest to me, I like to have a record for when I go back and reread old posts. But this time I was gone for two weeks and, taking into account how verbose my blog posts tend to be, a detailed account of everything I did would run for 10,000 words ( Read more... )

I was tempted not to even write a post about this since so much of it is reminiscing and catching up with friends, but I do go back and read my old posts occasionally. It'll have value for me even if it's boring for everyone else.

FridayNothing much exciting happened on Friday. We went to the airport after work, waited for our plane, got on ten ( Read more... )

The Aethra Chronicles is on Archive.org!

The Aethra Chronicles has the distinction of being one of two shareware games I ever mail-ordered the full version for. Or, more accurately, asked my father to mail order the full version for, the other being the excellent Castle of the Winds, an early graphical roguelike which is sadly a Windows 3.1 game ( Read more... )