Dave and Nihongonauts

Posted by Dave at March 9th, 2008

Severed dog penis found on sidewalk a mere two blocks or so from my house.

Walking back from Bic Camera yesterday, I happened upon this sitting in the middle of the sidewalk near my home. At first, I wasn’t sure what it was. I thougth maybe it was the tail of some barnyard creature or something until I kneeled down for a closer look. To my horror, I realized that I was looking at a severed dog penis with foreskin and partial scrotum intact. The cut appears to be clean and there was no blood in sight. Fucking weird.

Now the real question is whether stopping to photograph a severed dog penis makes me a goddamned weirdo…

Posted by Dave at February 17th, 2008

The PC-Engine DUO-R combines an ordinary PC-Engine (card slot on left) and the Super CD-Rom2 unit. This was the second Duo released, followed by the Duo-RX which boasted a more streamlined design and a 6-button controller standard.

Chances are, if you lived outside of Japan in the late ’80s and early 90’s, you have gone your whole life never having encountered the PC-Engine. Perhaps if you have a fleeting memory of it, you associate it with the ill-fated North American release of the tragically named and egregiously poorly marketed TurboGrafx 16. Why NEC decided to release the hardware in the States a full 2 years after its Japanese release and leave the vast majority of decent software in the land of the rising sun is anyone’s guess, but the result is that most of us are either willfully ignorant of this 8-bit powerhouse or associate it with the ugly design and mind-numbingly awful 90’s “extreme” packaging of the PC-Engine’s inbred hillbilly cousin we sadly know as the TG-16.

The truth about the PC Engine is that it was an incredibly prolific (661 titles released on multiple formats between 1987 and 96) and popular (5,840,000 units moved) game machine in its home territory. Competing with the ubiquitous Famicom wasn’t easy (just ask Sega, who released a slew of competing machines to no avail), and the PC Engine’s price tag of nearly twice what the Famicom sold for didn’t help.

The SuperGrafx, ostensibly launched to compete with Sega’s 16-bit MegaDrive, boasted a pair of PC Engine processors working in tandem to allow for multiplane parallax scrolling and an increase in the number of simultaneously displayed sprites. It can play all PC Engine “HuCard” software as well as specially designed SuperGrafx titles (of which only a scant 5 were ever released. Despite the hit it takes in aesthetics, it can even be hooked up to a Super CD-Rom2 unit as shown above. The older model CD-Rom2 unit requires a bizarre harness and cable set up and doesn’t attach to the SuperGrafx so much as become tethered to it.

What the PC Engine did have was third party support that shamed Sega’s machines of the era. With Namco (or Namcot, as it was mysteriously called in those days), Hudson, Konami, and Taito pumping out a steady stream of arcade ports and original titles for the machine. The third parties it couldn’t woo were still covered via licensed ports of Sega (Altered Beast, Golden Axe, Shinobi, Power Drift, etc.) and Capcom (Strider, Forgotten Worlds) hits.

It also boasted a technological edge over its competitors thanks to the release of the first home CD-Rom unit (known as the CD-Rom2 or “CD-RomRom”) in 1988. The CD-Rom didn’t add much to the machine’s horsepower, but the memory allowances of CDs allowed for redbook audio and sleek cutscenes to be tacked onto games that could just as easily have been (and many times were) released on card. The CD-Rom unit itself was subject to several upgrades over it’s lifetime, with the Super CD sold as both a separate machine and as a RAM card that could be placed in the card slot to boost the capabilities of the exisitng unit. That was followed by the Arcade upgrade, which added even more RAM and was sold as a card only (separate versions for those upgrading the original RomRom and those seeking to augment their Super CD-Rom2).

The screen quality may be abysmal by today’s standards, and the cheap sound hardware makes it nearly impossible to find a unit today with working speakers, but the PC Engine GT was revolutionary at a time when the only competitor was Nintendo’s own Gameboy (whose design it apes unapologetically.)

A series of alternate PC-Engine base units were also released, including several revisions of the original unit that added RCA video output (the original supported only RF) and altered color schemes. Also in the mix were two portable units, the GT (pictured above) and the LT. The PC Engine LT didn’t follow the currently popular and eminently logical trend of reducing hardware size set by the Gameboy Pocket, Gameboy Advance SP, or PSP slim model, and instead bulked up their second portable. Meant as a tabletop affiar, it resembles a boxy laptop computer or an oversized GBASP and even contains a controller port for a second player. It can also be hooked up to the various CD units through the use of cumbersome harnesses and cables. It retailed for over 100,000 yen (around $1,000 now and not significantly less then). Used, these suckers run about $800 or so now.

Stay tuned for a look at the best software this machine has to offer.

Posted by Dave at October 27th, 2007

Absurd!!!

I’ll be the first to admit that Japan has many strange offerings for those unitiated Westerners who find themselves in Tokyo’s neon jungle or the rice paddies of rural Toyama. Far be it from me to pretend that Japan offers a “business as usual” experience for sheltered Americans. What I find myself increasingly annoyed with, however, is the Western media’s insistence that Japan is so fucking wacky that the entirty of its 120 million residents spend an inordinate amount of time having sex with robots while dining on lobsters caught in arcade claw machines with square watermelons for desert and wearing used schoolgirl panties purchased at conveniently located vending machines, all the while enjoying bizarre and dangerous gameshows on holographic televisions and relaxing with a nice massage administered by a team of sex slaves dressed as prepubescent maids.

Insane!!!

Simple cultural misunderstandings are par for the course, and I wouldn’t begrudge any self-respecting American’ their much deserved head scratching when faced with cubic watermelons. It seems odd to us, and that’s a pretty damn normal reaction from where I sit. If the AP wants to marvel at it in the Sunday paper’s culture section, so be it.

Weird!!!

Hell, even the Japanese insist that they are the most unique motherfuckers on Earth, never missing an opportunity to imply that no round eye could ever learn their language or marvel at the chopstick handling of a white barbarian. I lost track of how many times I’ve heard the tired phrase ware ware nihonjin, a fairly innocuous piece of language on the surface, it means simply “We Japanese” when taken at face value, but contains more jingoistic nuance than a Texas Minutemen convention. The real meaning behind these 9 syllables is “We Japanese, who are, and will be for all of eternity, far different (read “superior”) and much more unique (read “cultured and educated”) than you or anyone else on the fucking planet.”

Vaguely unnerving!!!

Unfortunately, the last few decades of “wacky Japanese” reporting has left the Western press so desensitized and jaded that they no longer bother to check sources, secure translators who can tell their head from their own bloated ass, or excersize anything resembling editorial restraint. Hell, if those crazy motherfuckers made square watermelons, they can do anything! Why dig beneath the surface and see what a story is really about when a sensationalistic headline can get readers to shake their heads and purse their lips in disgust at the insane antics of “those yellow folks” who make nice cars, but eat fish without bothering to cook it first?

Wacky!!!

Case in point: This journalistic abortion courtesy of the New York Times. It details the skirt above, created by avant garde artist and self proclaimed “experimental fashion designer” Aya Tsukioka. Her latest work is a skirt which unfolds to reveal a printed pattern mimicking Japan’s ubiquitous soft drink vending machines. It’s a pretty cool piece of art, and like much good art, it takes it’s inspiration from the changing cultural zeitgeist of the artist herself. Japanese news sources reveal that she was “inspired” by Japan’s recent rise in street crime (oddly, crime statistics in Japan have been on the decline for years now, but we’ll give Tsukioka a pass because her art is pretty fucking cool.) She envisions it as a sort of disguise for someone with a rapist hot on their heels in a dark alley. Turn a corner, “transform” into a vending machine, and blend into the background. For whatever reason, the Times (along with scads of other Western news outlets) have somehow decided that her inspiration equates to practical usage and insinuates quite clearly that this is a widespread fashion trend and that people are actually wearing these damn things as a crime prevention measure! That’s right. Using a few soundbite type quotes from the artist taken out of context and likely poorly translated and edited to boot, the New York Times has taken a single art experiment and reported it as hard news.

I don’t care how many goddamned square watermelons or whorehouses catering to pro wrestling fetishes there are in Japan, it is on the same fucking planet as all the other “normal” countries out there and the same motherfucking rules of logic and laws of nature apply. Could anyone seriously see these photos and draw the conclusion that this is anything other than art? Who in their right fucking mind could imagine that this has some sort of practical use? Has the image of the “wacky Jappy” really progressed to the point where no one questions this kind of bullshit and it can get printed in a major metropolitan newspaper? Jesus Christ…