Star Soldier

I picked up this excellent condition copy of Star Soldier at Geo the other day, for just 600 yen.

It was still in it’s original box. This is another famous Famicom shooting scroller, made famous by Takahashi Meijin. You can see the contents of the box.

The safety insert and the plastic bag for the cartridge are still there. Some one took really good care of it. The instruction book is a simple fold out one. On one side it details controls and strategies.

On the other it has illustrations of the enemies and their point values.

Takahashi Meijin also gives his stamp of approval.

They also recommend using the Famicom controller that has rapid fire. Which is coincidentally made by Hudson the makers of this game.

Other interesting things about the box are, when you open the box on one of the tabs there is a picture of the hero of Star Soldier.

Also on the back of the box there are no picture of the actual game. You have to buy it on blind faith that it might look good and guess what genre it might be by the picture on the front.

This would never happen nowadays. The game itself is very fun. It’s interesting playing the genesis of the shooting game craze of the 1980’s.

Kenshiro

I previously talked about the Fist of the North Star figures, well I picked up the Kenshiro figure.

He comes with many different interchangeable hands, two different heads and a set of nunchaku. The figure is incredibly pose-able. He has two joints for his knees alone. I did a couple poses and took pictures.

Here he is in a Kung Fu stance ready to kick some ass.

Here he’s got his nunchaku. The chain on them is actually metal. The detail of the painting on the figure is awesome. His boots actually look like worn leather. Really cool and actually quite affordable at only 2490 yen. Not bad!

Disgaea 3

I got my North American version of Disgaea 3 in the mail yesterday from Play Asia. I was so happy I got it the morning after my birthday, and very conveniently just before  the weekend! I’ve been playing and loving the strategy awesomeness. You can see the trailer below.

Birthday Goodies

Well yesterday was my birthday. I got a bit older, but I also got some really good stuff. My darling wife got me a super cool Super Mario pixel art set.

It comes with little plastic boards that have holes and lots of different color pegs. You can make all kinds of Super Mario pictures with it. I decided to make the one on the box cover.

Pretty cool isn’t it. She also got me my copy of Metal Gear Solid 4 as an early birthday present. Thanks Yurie!

My wonderful co-workers at Starry also had a nice chocolate cake for me, as well as some really cool gifts. I got a giant Umaibo!

I put a normal size one next to it for scale purposes. Would you believe it’s just one super huge Umaibo!!! Just kidding! That would be much too difficult to eat. It’s actually packed with tons of normal size Umaibo. They also got me a Gatchamn X Kewpie phone strap.

It Joe the cool guy of the team. It’s going to go well with the Ken and Jun ones that I have.

You can almost see in his cute Kewpie eyes that urge to push the button to launch the “Bird Missiles”. Don’t do it Joe, It’s too dangerous! Finally I got a set of little figurines of the Skeleton Shocker bad guys from Kamen Rider.

It’s kind of like a stacking balance game. You can put them in all kinds of positions, as shown on the back of the box.

I tried stacking them in the pyramid position. Here’s a picture.

Very cute and evil! So many thanks to the whole gang at Starry!

Moon Burger

I ate this at McDonald’s on Monday. They call it the “Moon Watching Burger”.

It’s basically a normal hamburger with egg, bacon and like a mayo type sauce on it. They call it moon burger because the egg looks like a full moon. It was good tasting, but while I was eating it I felt like I was raising my cholesterol by ten levels. You might be  wondering why there are rabbits on the poster. Japanese people have an old belief that rabbits live on the moon and make mochi (a gooey sticky rice sweet).

Sanrio

I took a picture of the Sanrio Store at the Diamond City shopping mall.

Sanrio is the company that make Hello Kitty and all kinds of cute characters. The store has an unbelievable amount of Kitty merchandise.

One would almost say too much! Little girls must love it though.

Mutant, Mutant

I spotted this at Super Potato yesterday. Apparently in Japan not only are the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles mutant ninjas.

Over here they’re also mutant warriors! How can they be double mutants?

Slime

I got this awesome Dragon Quest blue slime bank at 7/11 this weekend. It’s so adorably cute.

The added bonus is it contained a surprise inside. It could either be a small cloth with a picture on it or a phone strap plushy with a screen cleaner. I got the strap, a pink angle slime. Very cool!

Cave Story

I’ve been playing this Japanese indie game by Pixel. It’s a super fun Metriod style game. You roam around caves fighting monsters and bad guys. It’s all very retro and really fun. The graphics styled after NES/Famicom type graphics.

What’s unbelievable is that it was made by one person in his free time. It took him over five years to make it. I’m playing a PSP version that someone ported, but there also is the original PC version and a MAC version as well. You can get them at the Cave Story Tribute site. The best part is they are all free. They have both English and Japanese versions. The PSP version is here. Check out the trailer below to see the game in action.

Cho Senji Temple

When it was sunny the other day, I not only went to the park, I also went to the temple near my house.

They just rebuilt a lot of the temple. It’s now all fresh wood. I think most temples are made without using nails, so it is easier to take out and replace pieces that are no longer good.

The bell tower was really cool. It’s the first time I’ve seen a tall one like this. The only bad thing is you can’t ring the bell like the ones that are on the ground.

They had like a storage building too. On the rook there was incredibly detailed dragon statues.

They even had little whiskers. Really nice looking. There was a little garden of nicely trimmed trees, but there was one strange one that caught my eye.

That whole thing that is held up by poles is actually one small tree!

I’ve never seen a tree grown this way before. How did they get it to grow that way!?