見たmorphosis

So Fallout 3 has been refused classification in Australia because of their stupid rating system from the Atari era that doesn’t take into account anything with any more depth than Pac-man. Officially, because of too much drug use. Unfortunately because our local distributors get their stock from Australia, with many games a nasty side effect is that our local stores only get supplies of the censored Australian version of the game, regardless of the game’s legal status here. It’s been that way for a while and until they get their fucking act together, we’ll continue to get fucked along with them. Sad really.

There was a better article on this, but I can’t find it anymore so have this one – The Gamesman bought out by EB/Gamestop. I kept meaning to write about it back when it first broke, but… I’m lazy. It’s kind of a big deal because it means that the only game specialist stores in New Zealand with more than one branch will be EB stores, which are in a strange quantum state of being overpriced yet constantly on sale. I’m a bit surprised by this, because the management of GDE, which ran The Gamesman, seemed pretty anti-EB.

As in, it was not unheard of for staff in the course of a normal trip out to the mall to feel compelled to enter an EB store for the sole purpose of making disparaging comments about the decor, hygiene of the staff and general inferiority of the chain. Sure, the first few times it was amusing, but every single mall trip got to be a bit excessive, and wound up with this writer dragging said staff member out of the store forcibly and trying to avoid future mall visits. Talking to the girlfriend of another staff member dispelled the notion that this was an individual quirk. An entire company full of people who do this seems a bit weird, but I suppose their corporate culture was kinda weird anyway…

Plus there seemed to be a bit of bad blood due to EB’s decision to stock Madman DVDs from Madman Australia rather than the (now formerly) GDE-run Madman NZ, the reason for which was, from what I remember, that they suspected a conflict of interest due to their running of The Gamesman chain. While that’s ancient history due to EB no longer stocking DVDs and GDE no longer distributing Madman, I do wonder how much it cost to get Phil to swallow his pride and accept this offer. I’m also a bit wary that they seem to be setting the online business to compete directly with GP Store, but hey, I’m not telling anyone how to run their business.

The Vodafone iPhone pricing came out and wow, 1GB per month for $250 a month? Mmm, price gouging. There’s little else to say other than “Are you exploiting a monopoly here?” Gah this makes me remember why I hate marketing types.

So tl;dr – Australia fucking us over, America fucking us over, corporations fucking us over. Sucks living in a small country. The answer is always import.

Via Kotaku and video from Campbell Live

Tags: antipodes, apple, bloody australians, bloody yanks, mobile, rant, sucks to be me

Yes, PS3 firmware update 2.40 has arrived, full of fancy new features such as trophies (including an overhaul of the PSN profiles – very nice), custom soundtracks for games and in-game XMB.

Unfortunately, I don’t own any first party games that have trophy or soundtrack support currently. Which leaves my PSN account at Level 1 with no trophies, and still listening to the same old music. Just like everyone else on my PSN friends list (all two of them, one of which is my US account). But I can access the XMB in-game.

And at least I have the clock! Which is 5 minutes fast and thinks I’m on daylight saving time. *sigh* Hopefully Assassin’s Creed and Ratchet and Clank patch in trophies soon.

Tags: gaming, Playstation 3, Sony

I’ve been waiting to get some accurate numbers and information on this before posting about this, and it looks like the final toll is 7 dead, 10 injured – 6 men and 1 woman, ranging in age from 19 to 74.

To sum it up, 25 year old man Tomohiro Kato rented a 2 ton truck from Shizuoka and drove it 150km to Tokyo and into a crowd of people in Akihabara. He then got out of the car and started stabbing people at random with a survival knife. The police showed up, overpowered him and took him away while ambulances showed up and took the wounded to various hospitals.

He claimed to have been acting alone and there were initially reports of him being a gang member, but those claims appear to be false. The reasons given for his rampage were “I was tired of life” and “I wanted to kill anyone” (in the sense of “I wanted to kill people and had no particular target in mind” rather than “I wanted to kill everyone”).

The Akihabara area is of course plenty busy on Sundays with shoppers buying up on games, computer gear, anime/manga merchandise, porn etc. and the station itself (where the murderer was allegedly heading towards) is a reasonable sized transportation hub linking something like 4 above ground train lines and 2 subway lines. That coupled with the Sunday tradition of closing the main street to form a pedestrian mall meant that there would be plenty of foot traffic to target. Though I suspect that tradition is going to come to an end very shortly. Which is a shame, given that I keep meaning to go and always wind up in Harajuku on Sundays instead. But I digress.

Interestingly there’s also this piece of news on the NHK site – Advance notice of murder found in website – that posts were found on “a bulletin board” warning of the attack. It doesn’t specify what board and the only outlet reporting this is NHK so it’s a bit dodgy (then again, it’s from this morning’s news a few hours ago), but it’s an indication that this may go a bit deeper. The coming days will tell, I suppose, I don’t really want to speculate too much.

There’s a fairly in depth article on The Guardian, if you want to know more/my summary was crappy. I wouldn’t trust CNN on this – they’re using the same AP article as Fox News with an equally sensationalistic headline (”Man on ‘murder mission’ stabs 17 in Tokyo” and “Man Plows Into Crowd, Goes On Stabbing Rampage; 7 Reported Dead” respectively). I wonder when they turned into such a piece of shit. Though their T shirt scheme cracks me up. I alternate between thinking it’s a terrible idea and a brilliant one.

Via BBC, NHK, Kotaku (well, kind of), The Guardian and Yomiuri Online

Tags: akiba, Japan, tokyo, wtf

Well ok, there never was a Nintendo New Zealand technically – instead, there is a company that distributes their product locally under licence. Or rather, was a company. See, it turns out Softprint Interactive who used to do this (and Activision and also Logitech and a whole raft of other brand names) has gone under, with no replacements yet in sight. Which means no Wii Fit and no Super Smash Bros Brawl in New Zealand for the foreseeable future.

Most people would consider this bad news, but then, I’ve never really been a big fan of Nintendo. So much so that I’m currently doing the Sony fangirl jig of delight.

This isn’t the first time Nintendo distribution has failed epically in New Zealand, of course. The previous distributor Monaco threw in the towel right before the release of the Wii, which I think left things up in the air for us a bit back then (hey, I didn’t really want a Wii so I wasn’t following the news too carefully). And even when distribution has been functional, Nintendo consoles and handhelds haven’t been hugely popular – the DS was being beaten by the PSP fairly regularly even back when the rest of the world had written the PSP off, the N64 did poorly and so on and so forth back through all the generations. So really, it’s just another chapter in a book of failure.

Anyway, recommence jig of schadenfreude!

Via Geekpulp, Kotaku and NZGamer

Tags: antipodes, fuck yeah, gaming, Nintendo, sucks to be you

I want a Totoro shaped cream puff so bad right now.

Apparently what appears to be a Ghibli licensed patisserie, making nothing but Totoro shaped cream puffs, has showed up in suburban Tokyo. This image is making me hungry. The details, in case anyone who reads this is anywhere near Tokyo:
3-21-21 Takaido Higashi, Suginami-ku, Tokyo, and the map shows it as close to the Takaido station off the Keio Inokashira line. The hours are 11am-7pm with Wednesdays off. Website: http://www.shiro-hige.com

Of course, I’m far more likely to end up there than at Patisserie Swallowtail. Even if… mmm, delicious…

Except, goddamn, now I’m craving omu-rice. With something cute drawn on the top in tomato sauce, or something. Which of course any self-respecting maid cafe in Japan, or even less self-respecting places outside of Japan would do.

Of course, there’s other novelty cafe options in Tokyo. I don’t exactly make a habit of trying them all (maybe I should?) because so many of them are temporary affairs, but there’s always this place:

The menu is… a bit odd. There’s a disconcertingly large amount of pasta on there, and there was also a photo of a burger containing kiwifruit. And to top it all off, there’s an Outback Steakhouse next door *shakes fist*

The address, in case you’re interested, is 6-1-3 Roppongi, Minato-ku, Tokyo. It’s fairly close to Roppongi station on both the Oedo line and Hibiya line, and there’s more info on the site if you need it.

Probably my favourite of the places is Jackson Hole from the live action film, anime and manga franchise NANA. It technically doesn’t count as a novelty food place, given the bar existed before the manga, but it’s still nice because the entire place is exactly as it appears in the show. And of course there’s the Jackson Burgers, which are kind of small and kind of expensive, but oh so tasty.

Unfortunately, they closed their original store at the end of March this year and moved, and I can’t find their new address. It’s on the north side Chofu station on the Keio line (changing at Shinjuku is the easiest way to go) in Tokyo though, as opposed to the south side where it was previously. I don’t know if they’ll keep the decor or anything, but no doubt they’ll still have the burgers.

Via Nausicaa.net and Yahoo News

Tags: Anime, antipodes, food, Japan, Studio Ghibli, tokyo, travel

It’s time for more news from the arse end of the world!

First off, a big fuck you Australia! Turns out they’re just a bunch of uptight pricks after all.

Basically, our local distributors rely on Australian distribution channels and ended up with the censored Australian version of GTAIV which was rated R18 (i.e restricted to people 18 and over). However, the uncensored version was recently submitted to the Office of Film and Literature Classification, and passed with the same R18 rating. Unfortunately our lazy major retailers will no doubt keep importing from Australia, but it means you won’t be arrested for importing it from the States or UK, or paying someone else to import it. After all, it doesn’t make sense banning the uncensored version on the basis of prostitution scenes in a country where you can legally go out and get a prostitute at that age.

Madman AU being bought out again? After being bought out by Australian toy company Funtastic, it turns out Funtastic has been going down the shitter ever since. Buying another company only tangentially related to your main business might not be such a good idea after all! I should have guessed something was up when they lost the bidding war for Evangelion 1.0. But yes, right when Funtastic were considering setting Madman adrift again, the Archer consortium is trying to buy Funtastic out.

Certainly the Funtastic takeover seemed like a bit of a shambles from the New Zealand consumer perspective – Funtastic bought out Planet Fun, a local toy distributor and transferred control of Madman NZ to them while they were at it, whereas previously it was operated by Gamewizz Digital Entertainment (which had its own problems, but we should probably let bygones be bygones). While we only really see our monopolistic distributors at the Armageddon conventions, the changeover was immediately obvious with a rather glaring and disappointing change in policy (spearheaded by the folk of Madman AU) – that of DVD convention pricing being little different from RRP, which led to some rather annoyed customers.

From what I understand, Madman NZ distribution and so on is controlled as a smaller piece of the larger Funtastic machinery in operation here – which puts Urotsukidoji right next to the High School Musical game, and of magnitudes less importance. It doesn’t help that Gamesplus (a local gaming chain and anime retailer) closed down last year, leaving far fewer retail stores stocking anime DVDs and generally fucking over their plan of getting their DVDs into the Sounds music stores run by the same folks. Not all the business set-backs are their fault. But at the same time, the word from their existing retailers seems to be that things are still a mess on their DVD distribution front – do they even have a dedicated manager for the DVD part of their NZ business? It doesn’t seem so, given they still have Sylvester Ip from the Australian arm of the business coming over to manage con events. Like I said, a mess.

If you live in Auckland, you might want to try JB Hi-Fi instead – I’m under the impression they get their stock direct from Australia (like EB Games used to until they stopped distributing DVDs altogether). Last I saw they had plenty of Death Note Limited Edition Vol 1 and 2 boxes, which Madman NZ has apparently long run out of. Of if you aren’t already, consider importing. It really makes more sense, particular given our whole DVD region free thing.

About the only good thing Planet Fun have achieved is managing to get the Madman DVDs into The Warehouse chain, which is effectively the largest DVD retailer in the country, from memory. Yet their business still appears haphazard and ill-managed, with the New Zealand fan ultimately losing out. So will this buyout improve things? Somehow I doubt it – Madman NZ is now a small part of Madman Australia, which in turn is a small part of Funtastic, which is in the process of being swallowed by a progressively larger whale. Doesn’t seem good. And they still need to make the shift over to Blu-ray.

Sorry, this turned a bit ranty. Hmm.

Also, because there’s always so little local news, there’s this: Warhammer Online worldwide simultaneous release actually including us, with a dedicated server even. I was rather excited about this bit of local news until I realised that I honestly couldn’t give a shit about Warhammer.

Via Stuff.co.nz, Anime News Network (ugh, I need a better source) and Kotaku

Tags: antipodes, bloody australians, rant, sucks to be you

So it turns out that now the Japanese social networking site Mixi (it’s like a Japanese equivalent of Facebook, I guess, so it’s kind of a big deal) have made a Japanese cellphone email address compulsory for all new registrations (this is on top of already requiring an invite from an existing member). This new measure effectively limits it to people resident in Japan only. It makes me rather relieved I already have an account, because as far as I can tell, they’re not enforcing it retroactively.

Maybe I’m just being a bit optimistic about their intentions, but it looks to me like a slightly shortsighted and misguided way for them to cut down on spam accounts, rather than any particular hate for foreigners – like a more extreme version of how US sites occasionally ask for a zip code (12345 and 90210 is how I roll). Still, the end result is that it prevents anyone outside of Japan from registering, and that sucks. Go whore yourself on Stickam instead.

via Tofugu

Tags: internet, Japan, sucks to be you