Issue 4: It Sucked from Tokyo

Konnichiwa, suckers!

SL is back, and it's painting an all-American pin-up girl on the side of this column and dropping it with a great big "Yee-Haw!" on the Tokyo Game Show. Boom!

What? Too soon? No. Um.... Too late? Yeah. WWII jokes are so half a century ago. How about...?

This SL column is like an angry King Kong (the good and cheesy guy-in-a-rubber-suit Kong...not the bad and way-too-cheesy CGI Kong) that humiliates Godzilla (again, rubber suit = good, CGI = bad. The formula also works for Jabba the Hut) in an all-out ocean battle where Kong eventually gets so bored kicking Godzilla's big, scaly ass that he reaches into the water and pulls out a handful of baby whales and just starts chucking them at her until Godzilla gets sick of all these baby whales smacking her in the face and all these mother whales coming up to her and asking if she's seen their babies around here anywhere that she low-tails it back to Monster Island to see if Godzuki has cleaned his cave yet...

No. No. No. How about...?

This is the year when the geekeratti is buzzing about how the TGS is the new E3 and the old E3 is deader than a baby whale stuck in the neck folds of a rampaging movie monster. What? Why? Are their booth babes hotter than ours? Their fans more obsessed than ours? Their journalists drunker and less educated than ours? Their game demos more premature and over-hyped than ours? Maybe. And maybe Japan can do everything, from technology to fashion to square watermelons, better than the good old USA, but historically, a lot of suckiness has emigrated from the golden-fried shores of the Land of the Jellied Shrimp, and I've got a happy super good list of the suckiest of the sucky.

Cooking Mama - Cooking sim - Majesco Games - Nintendo DS

Cooking Mama? B-b-but, you stammer like a sweaty anime schoolboy, Cooking Mama isn't sucky...it's awesome! Of course it's awesome...you get to make meatballs. And when you toss the meatballs back in forth using the stylus, it somehow feels like an actual handful of ground meat and egg mixture. And when you're done making meatballs...you get to make something else. Like rice in omelet, complete with ketchup smiley emoticon. Totally awesome.

A little too awesome. For example, I got my Cooking Mama after my sister left her copy at my house, and decided to just buy a new one instead of coming back for it. (True story. The rest of this column, however, is a mixture of bullshit and stuff I overheard at GameSpot.) Sure, my apartment is an entire 45-minute assy train ride from my sister's place, but still...it's a game that's hard to live without. Combine that with the fact that, unlike other games that feature Japanese cuisine like Harvest Moon, the food in Cooking Mama actually looks like it would taste good. And you've got a recipe for disaster, my friend.

Imagine you pick up and start playing Cooking Mama. Then, 16 hours later, starving and craving octopus balls, you stumble into the only place still open: a corner market specializing in Japanese imports and outdated feminine hygiene products. You grab a dusty bag of pickled durian...or something that looks like pickled durian. Yes, sure, some candy from Japan tastes good, but most of it tastes like a cross between 200 year old ribbon candy and The Devil...particularly the stuff you just put in your mouth.

Are You Businessman? - Weird collectable - Yugin

My brother in-law is a Jew, but he still celebrates Christmas. Not in the way some people celebrate it with trees and decoration and sticky popcorn balls. No, he celebrates by giving me strange presents like Are You Businessman? And laughing his damn ass off while I try to figure out what the hell to do with this thing.

I'm sure that somewhere on the box it says to "collect them all", but I already have the Businessman who wears a green suit in a ridiculously oversized flower garden, and the one who cries blood while standing in a crosswalk. Why would I also want the one who pukes in front of a sunset or the one who sweats through his shirt at a construction site?

I finally just gave mine to the cat. It's his problem now.

Virtual Boobies

Now, I love the DOA babes as much as the next gal, but seriously...with Next Gen comes double Ds in HD, and that's just going a bit too far.

...

I'm engrossed in a semi-translated from the original Japanese text conversation with an NPC. I've just pressed the A or X or O button. I expect something. I don't care what. Something about haunted body parts or souls that get trapped in stuffed penguins or robotic frogs that are addicted to calisthenics, but for the love of everything holy, don't just give me three dots. And then, after I get nothing but three dots, and then I hit the button again, don't give me another damn ellipses...please.

American Tourists

God damn! I'm so sick and tired of smug, annoying people coming back from a three day business trip to Tokyo (like say, for TGS) and acting like their poop don't stink just because the last place it hit water was in a talking toilet that lights up and thanks you very much for the happy deposit. They just go on and on, needlessly name-dropping neighborhoods: "You know, Harajuku is just so two years ago. Now it's all about Shibuya. I bought a cell phone that wipes my ass there." Great. And of course you know for a fact that they spent the whole time drinking themselves blind on Happoshu and sake bombs, leaving just in time to buy a cheap Pokemon tote bag at the airport so they can hide their new tentacle porn from their girlfriend.

Para Para Paradise - Legless Dance Revolution - Konami - Sony PS2

Okay, this tears it. The folks at Konami are on to us. They just introduced a party game at TGS that simultaneously celebrates and ridicules a new Japanese super cool trend. In this case the trend is Para Para, a Japanese dance that uses the arms, much like The Bird, a dance made famous by The Time's Morris Day and his man servant Jerome in the movie Purple Rain. Unlike The Bird and The Electric Slide, Para Para is done to not just one song, but to many different songs. More specifically, to bad J-pop and techno. Very bad. So bad it hurts. Hurts so good! Right now, I'm obsessed with the Go Go Girl's One Night in Arabia, a hump 'n' bumper about a sexual encounter in the desert with a "blue" man. (Why is he blue? Do the Go Go Girls know nothing about Middle Eastern people except what they learned from Disney's Aladdin? Or are they mixing up an Arabian theme with sexual attraction to Paul Giamatti in Big Fat Liar?) "I just can say salaam!"

Come on, culture vultures! You know you want it. They even put a nonsensical Engrish description on the cover. It was probably written by a communications major from New Jersey, but still.... "Hi-Tension Vibe", "Super Bass Sound"...hilarious!

Anime and Manga

It's not that I have a problem with anime and manga, I'm just sick of the obsessed fan boys and girls who won't stop complaining about people who watch Cowboy Bebop without reading, or (horrors) even knowing about, the Cowboy Bebop Manga. Shut up! Stop saying Bebop! Stop saying Manga! Why do you care who watches the stuff you watch? Get a life! Furthermore, this is coming from a girl who freely admits to eating candied devil and giving her cat bad Japanese imports for Christmas and also who has never even seen Cowboy Bebop because it is on too late, so yeah...you really need to get a life.

Seaman 2 Sega Sony PS2

Speaking of getting a life. Were you one of those people who spent way too much time playing the getting-a-psychological-mindfuck-from-a-grouchy-man / fish sim for the Dreamcast? So much time, you started to feel bad about yourself? So much time, you couldn't look down on anime fan boys anymore? Well just when you thought you've released yourself from your murky, pixilated prison, Sega announces Seaman 2 at TGS.

This time, instead of a fish it's a pre-historic man. But that's just the demo. What about the actual game? Could it be that the game follows our little digital grumpster from primordial ooze to modern, erectly-standing modern (sea)man? Possibly...either way, you know you want it. Guiltily, tragically like a heart patient wants deep fried pork. You'll even buy the special controller they're going to make us buy. You'll apologize to the anime fans for making fun of their obsessive ways. You can taste the candied devil meat now.

Are you a HARDCORE GAMER? Put your money where your mouth is - get a gamer T-shirt and wear it proudly!

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