Adrift in Japan

Babble

Currently filling my spare time playing Babble. Sort of like Boggle but with points depending on both Scrabble letter values and word length. If you're looking for me there, my user name is "devvie."

Made in Wario

If you read about our cell phone buying experience at Yodobashi, you know Matt won the lucky draw on our way out. Or so we were told. Hirata-san said she'd send our new GameBoy Advance to us, but we weren't holding our breath. With no proof or paperwork, we had no idea whether we had really won or whether the GameBoy would ever show up.

Clearly we were wrong to doubt. On the 8th, our new GameBoy Advance SP showed up at Matt's office, complete with a game we had absolutely no hope of being able to play. Naruto, which seems to be some sort of action game, was impossible for us to follow, so even though we were excited about having this new little gadget, it got very little play. Until yesterday.

Yesterday we took my cousin Kip's advice. We went to Yodobashi (there's some repitiveness in our lives here) in search of Wario Ware. Of course, nothing is as easy as it sounds. There were plenty of games, and the Mario World games were pretty obvious, but Wario Ware was not. I started to look for other possible purchases, which included Tetris World or a driving game, or something else that looked easy to figure out without knowing Japanese. But Matt found it. Or rather, he found a game called "Made in Wario," which seemed like it might be the right one. I squinted at the packaging and figured that the appearance of the number "200" and "5" on the packaging could not be coincidence - it must refer to the 200 mini-games, 5 seconds for each game. We were outta there.

It only took a few minutes of playing before Matt was hooked. The game is a fast-paced sequence of mini-games. The first time you play each game, part of the challenge is figure out the object of the game - which you have 5 seconds to accomplish. You can get a sample of what it's like at the Wario Ware website. It's frenetic, actually. Some of the stories and the games are bizarre (line up your finger to pick your nose), and others are tributes to older Nintendo games (Duck Hunter). Plus, as you play, you can unlock other games, such as Dr. Wario, which you can play as "stand-alones" (ie, for more than 5 seconds at a time).

We've only unlocked 5 of the stories so far, but it's a blast, and half the fun is figuring things out as we go along. The words are still written in Japanese, but at least they aren't very important to the games.

This week Matt's professor and his wife gave us one of their old VCRs, plus a bunch of their movies (English with Japanese subtitles). It plays tapes, yes, but it also lets us watch the bilingual track on TV, which our TV was too old to do. And, we can plug my laptop in to the VCR and play DVDs through the TV. Suddenly our home entertainment options have practically tripled. Plus there's the GameBoy.

We're going back to the US next week for a rapid-fire tour of Southern California. We have a chance to pick up GameBoy games in English (among other things on our shopping list). So, if you have any suggestions for games, leave a comment!