Chubby Astro

I spotted this in a Sunkus convenience store flyer recently. It was to promote some merchandise for Osamu Tezuka (creator of Astro Boy) series. It the cutest, chubbiest stuffed Astro Boy doll.

Just adorable!

3D Picross

One one my latest gaming obsessions beside Resident Evil 5 is “Rittai Picross”

Picross is a logic game in which you make little pictures using the numbers on the side of the grid to tell you which blocks you should fill in, like in the picture below.

Rittai Picross is like normal picross, but in 3D, which makes it even more fun. It’s a completely different way of thinking than normal Picross. I recommend it to anyone who likes puzzles. So far only the Japanese version is out, but it’s so easy to use that the language barrier is nonexistent. You can see the commercial that Nintendo has been running non-stop on TV below.

Better and Better

How do you make the best burger (in my opinion) in the world better…..

By adding bacon of course. Lotteria has taken their heavenly tasting Zeppin cheese burger and added slices of bacon. Making it even more of a heart stopping greasy delight. Mmmmm bacon!

White Day

White Day is a special holiday created by Japanese chocolate companies. Not content to just make truckloads of money on Valentines Day, they decided to create a new exploitable holiday. Traditionally Valentines Day is the reverse of how it is in western countries. Girls give chocolates to boys. On White Day, the boys return the favor and give the girls something more lavish than what they received. Since my nieces gave me some nice homemade chocolate on Valentines Day, I got them some nice chocolate for White Day.

I even bought really cute bags to put the chocolate in. I hope they like the stuff I bought.

Chili

I am a lover of chili. Sometimes I make it myself at home, but a lot of times when I want a quick fix at lunch time I go to the can stuff. It seems that most stores that carry foreign foods only have the American brand Hormel chili (which is OK when your really craving it). My favorite brand is Stagg Chili, which I used to buy all of the time back in Canada. Well there is one Yamaya store in Sendai that carries Stagg chili. Today I was in the neighborhood, and picked up their complete stock, five wonderful cans.

So if you live in Sendai and are going to Yamaya near Tsutsujigaoka park to get chili, don’t bother I beat you to it!

Get It Done!

Sometimes things don’t make any sense in Japan (actually it happens a lot). Movie often take months to come out over here. A good example is the latest James Bond movie took months. In fact there are some movies coming out in the theater in Japan that are already on DVD in America. What perplexes me the most is the new craptastic live action American made Dragonball movie is actually coming out in Japan before it comes out in America.

I comes out around four weeks before and people in North America have to suffer through it. What a waste of resources. Anyways watch this questionable quality trailer.

GameSpite

I was very happy today because FedEx dropped off my copy of GameSpite volume one. It’s a small print run book filled with articles from one of my favorite websites, GameSpite. It features the writings of various game journalist, including Jeremy Parish from 1up. It mostly covers retro and niche type games. I can’t wait to dig in and read it.

Japanese Spiderman

I came across this video clip while browsing the internets. It a 1970’s live action version of Spiderman from Japan! Enjoy the disco Spiderman theme while watching this clip.

You can see the Japanese took a few liberties with the Spiderman lore. Adding giant robots, monsters, samurai, and even spider man shooting a machine gun (what happened to shooting webs?). It turns out that Marvel.com will be subtitling the series and posting it on their website. Check it out! They have episode one up already.

Heat

I recently got tired of being cold at night sometimes when I was watching TV. I had been using an electric heater to warm my room, but it wasn’t enough. I needed more power. So I went out and bought this kerosene heater.

It definitely did the trick warming up the room really quickly. These are the most common type of heater you’ll see in Japan. The lack of central heating means most houses will have a few of these (ours has four). They work pretty good, but there are a couple problems. The first is you can’t leave them on at night time or you’ll suffocate. The second is buying and putting kerosene into it is a pain. A couple good points for mine is that it starts so much quicker than the other ones we have, and it plays little song like “Twinkle Twinkle” and “Love Me Tender”, so obviously mine is the most awesome.

Biohazard!

Last Thursday I picked up a copy of Biohazard 5, otherwise known as Resident Evil 5. One of the great things about PS3 is most of the software has multiple languages already on the disc. This is one of them.

I’m also lucky because I get to play this game way in advance of any one in North America. They have to wait until March 13th. So far Ive managed to finish the 3rd chapter, and it’s been really fun. I can’t wait to try co-op after I’ve finished the story by myself.