February 23, 1999

Flea markets ae great for collecting when you  are not fussy about quality.  This weekend I managed to find some PCE and MSX items I've been looking for, but not boxes or manuals.  Half of the fun is talking to the vendors at these markets who have obviously been doing this for years.  Listening to a couple of old guys who refer to each other as "aniki" (a very loving way to say brother) while trying to negotiate a mutually acceptable price for a pile of spider web covered cartridges can be a real blast!  Just like in the US, one must get to a flea market early and be willing to dig through piles of junk to find what you are looking for.  I'm still hoping for that "diamond in the rough" score, but it hasn't happened yet.

If you come to Japan and want to visit some flea markets, checkout  www.recycler.org which maintains weekly lists of flea markets around Japan mostly concentrating on the Tokyo.  The site is in Japanese and you will have to have an understanding of the train system to make it useful.

February 19, 1999

Today's column might be better titled "Grumpy Old Gamer".

Let's not go to the movies  I was talking to one of my Japanese co-workers the other day and he was telling me he finished Final Fantasy VIII the other night.  He said that his friends had finished it two days after it was released.  One of the other guys at work has not finished it yet.  He has played every Final Fantasy game since the series began 12 years ago.  Starting with FF7 he began to loose interest and now he says he probably won't even finish FF8.  His description was that it is like seeing a movie, not playing a game.  He liked the 2D Final Fantasy games because he used his imagination while enjoying the story.

I've decided I'm not even going to buy the English version of FF8 when it comes out.  That movie, you know... the one where a bunch of teenagers save the world from ultimate evil?, I've seen it too many times before.  I guess I'm getting old because about 2 million Japanese people are not tired of that movie yet.

Quick! Milk the cash cow! Chocobo racing for the PSX will be released soon.  Isn't that cute?

"I'm not BOY" is the ad slogan for the upcoming Neo Geo Pocket Color.  The ad features a teen aged or young man or woman with their NGPC somewhere in the shot.  Pretty good advertising.  Much better than the old Sega ads for Game Gear in the US where the Game Boy user had to hit himself in the head with a brick in order to see colors in his game.

Guns don't kill people... but backup devices do promote piracy.  There is anew product out of Hong Kong which attaches to a PC's parallel port and allows the user to back up Game Boy cartridges.  They also make SRAM carts which you can load up with your back-ups.  This product is marketed as a home development kit.  I like that idea and I wish that all the people who buy one use it like that.  I also wish my cats would not shed on my good suit, but one is about as likely as the other.

"History is the best early warning system" (unknown) How many of you owned a computer before IBM PCs or Macs existed?  I did.  My first computer was an Apple II+ and some of the coolest games came out around that time, many of them were later ported to various game consoles.  There are various people who now collect these "console computers" in the same way that you or I collect game consoles.  I came across the term "console computer" while browsing over a website devoted to the topic of collecting classic computers.  Those of you who remember the TI 994a, Radio Shack Color Computer, the Commodore 64, MSX or any model of Apple II should understand the term immediately.  Personal computers of that day were integrated devices.  The keyboard, CPU and most of the other features you needed to use the system were integrated into a single unit which could hook up to your TV or a monitor, (much like a game system).  Those of you whose first computer predated the IBM PC or Mac probably feel a certain nostalgia for that system.  Lots of Japanese feel the same way about the MSX series as I feel about the Apple II.

Those of you who missed out on those systems can experience some of the joys we old folks experienced by emulating console computers on a PC or Mac.  It seems there are emulators for all of the old console computers, just as there are emulators for most of the old game consoles.  I don't own that Apple II+ any more, but I could still play those games by emulating an Apple II+ on my PC.  You might even be emulating something while you are reading this.

Emulation seems to come up from the underground.  Emulators are almost always written by fans of the old system.  Is emulation the natural progression of "convergence" which has been prophesied for so long?  These days, a computer is little more than an appliance, just like Jobs and Wozniak hoped it might be.  I can use it to act like a whole variety of different things.  One of my co-workers loves emulation.  He tells me that he has hundreds of games.  I don't think he even has one.  For me though, the magic just isn't there.

For the record, I am not preaching.  I use fMSX and NESticle when I am too lazy to use the real thing.

February 17, 1999

Hunting has been good of late although Akihabara has been quite dead.  Explorations down towards the coast have been worthwhile and uncovered sources which I had passed by before.  Flea market season starts again soon, this should be good news.

Those of you who enjoyed Metal Gear Solid might be amused by the fact that the game play is really a 3D version of the two MSX versions of the game combined.

February 10, 1999

Another huge update to the pictures page.  Tomorrow is a national holliday so no shipments till friday.
 

February 8, 1999

Major update to the Pictures page.  As a small side note, part of why I so rarely update the pictures section is because I don't own a scanner.  Every so often I fill up a bag with games and go to the nearest Kinko's and rent time one one of their PCs and scan things in.  It only costs me about Y500/hour so uness I log over 40 hours of scanning time, it is cheaper than buying a scanner of my own.

Can you guess who this is?

It's our old friend Solid Snake!  This pic was scanned from the MSX version of Metal Gear.

February 5, 1999

Everyone Saw It Coming Connectix has been sued by Sony for their PSX emulator.  While you can bet your bottom dollar that Connectix knew this would happen before they released their product and have been prepared for it all along, smart money is not on Connectix to win this one.  I asked Superfami.com General Council Sidney Weeks for a comment on this issue:
 

"Connectix is not likely to have an IP (intellectual property) portfolio sufficient to give them a counter patent worthy of a cross licensing arrangement or dropping the suit.  Sony holds a much larger portfolio with over a thousand U.S. patents issued in the past year.

Asserting one's IP against alleged infringers a fundamental right of the IP owner.  As Texas Instruments hung in as a company using IP licenses when their product sales were low in the last decade, Sony appears to be hanging on now.  Sony has offered the standard press release style explanation that they have to protect their IP from free riding competitors but judging from news reports on their last few quarters, they could use the licensing fee not to mention gain from slowing a competitor."

Considering that Sony's overall profits are down and the current artificial strength of the Yen shows no signs of abating, Sony's position should come as no surprise to anyone.  When in doubt, follow the money.

February 4, 1999

Report on Seoul, Korea First of all here's a new word for those of you who are learning Japanese: "nisei-mono" which means a fake thing.  Multi carts for example are "nisei-mono".   The reason for this little vocabulary lesson will become clear in a moment.  On this trip to Seoul, I located the Korean equivalent of Akihabara, Yongsan Electronics Arcade.  To reach Yongsan from the City Hall station (the center of downtown Seoul) just take the number 1 subway for three stops and you are there.  The train station connects to the electronics market.  The main building is 4 floors which mostly consist of PC parts and software.  It would seem that the majority of gaming in Korea is done on PCs rather than on consoles.  PC CD ROMs are available at convenience stores and one of the after school TV shows features kids competing on PC games.  There are only a few stalls selling games in the main building of Yongsan.  The main area of game shops can be reached by taking the covered walkway exit on the second floor.  When you get outside, go left and there is a building full of game shops.  Unfortunately though 99% of what is available is "nisei-mono".  If you are the type of low life thief who wants to buy PSX CDRs and famicom multicarts, your little black heart will wheeze with joy.  I had honestly hoped to come home with just one original Korean video game, but it seems I was unable to locate one.  The only Korean original products I found were Samsung releases of Sega games for systems dating back to the Mark III.  I saw many types of Famicom clones, in fact, I stopped counting after I identified the 20th different FC clone.  On the positive side, I did locate a genuine SFC prototype copy of "Ultima The Savage Empire" as released by Pony Canyon (a Japanese label) and an original Konami soundtrack CD for the MSX "Metal Gear 2".

Akihabara News/SFC Price Indexing  It seems that Sofmap has caved in and decided not to sell any used games by Enix.  Why?  Well, Enix sued a store selling used games last year, so Sofmap decided it was better to avoid litigation than sell used copies of Dragon Quest.  Unfortunately, this means that titles such as "Star Ocean" for SFC will become harder to find and thus more expensive...  In other Sofmap news, bare Neo Geo ROM systems are on the rise, now going for more than $225 and here is the shocker; a cart version of "Metal Slug" is now at $1,000.  You read that right.  "Dracula X" is holding steady, but suplies seem to have  gone down.  Medialand (formerly Zet) seems to be following the "bundling" trend since they were selling a SuperGrafx package with 4 games and an RAU-30.   Unfortunately, their selection of FC, SFC, PCE and NCD games has been low for more than a month now.  It seems that the "New Year Slump" is lasting longer than usual.

A bit of luck On sort of a whim, I went to the 5th floor of Sofmap 13 and was lucky enough to find a boxed MSX "Metal Gear" and a bare cart of the same! The clerk tried to give me some story about how the price tags on the boxed one were wrong and it should have been 5,000 Yen more, but I wasn't having any of that! He caved in and I got it for the sticker price.  And if that wasn't good enough, around the corner at Maxload I found an MSX2+ system in the junk pile for about $10.  The floppy drive is broken but other than that it works fine!  Once I fix the floppy, I'll be able to play "Snatcher" and if I ever find a copy "SD Snatcher" as well.

Language Lesson 2 Now that you know what to call pirate goods, you might want to know that "hon-mono" means "the real thing".

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