Aug 4: Happy Birthday Jiuna!
Today I got up at around 11:30 and got my usual Yokosan lunch before voice chatting with Mom. I managed to ruin her lemon squares from several thousand kilometres away. D: After finishing talking to her I called Jiuna and sung her Happy Birthday while she was on the SkyTrain ahah. Since it's a long distance call, and we'll be seeing eachother in TWO DAYS, we kept the conversation brief.
After talking to Jiuna I headed out to Akiba for the day. The trip was mostly uneventful, as it often is now that I know the route by heart. I did manage to take a small wrong turn in Shinagawa station, which by chance led me to a bakery I had not seen before. It was full of baked goods more in the style of bakeries in Canada, which lit up my eyes with delight you can be sure, as I am a great fan of baked goods, and Japanese ones seem to put my stomach in a funk. I got some crusty roll that said something about Hokkaido on the tag, but it turned out to just be a really good roll with not too much (read: any) fancy stuff happening.
Once in Akiba I went to CLUB SEGA 2, to see if there were any other really terrible 3rd Strike and Melty Blood players about. Much to my amazement, even though it was a Thursday, there actually were! The Melty Blood people were bad enough that I could beat them, but the 3rd Strike people were playing Ken and Yun, so while they seemed equal to me in terms of ultra-scrubbiness, they simply did too much damage off of their hits and I couldn't beat them (I did take rounds though, hooray!).
After getting my fighting game fix, I wandered around Club Sega to see what was up. The arcades in Akiba constantly change their layout, which somehow makes it very exciting to explore them, even if they haven't actually gotten anything new. There was a Project Diva song release TODAY, but it's a Thursday, so it wasn't totally coo-coo-bananas. There was still a hefty lineup, so I didn't end up playing (if I want to play I can just go to Yokochuu haha). After all was said and done for exploring the 5th floor, I suddenly got an overwhelming urge to play Metal Slug when I walked past it again... Yeah... That got fixed pretty quick. >_> In a bizarre way, I kind of want to get good at it, because it's one of the only arcade games that you see consistently on the ferries in BC (I'm ignoring Tekken).
I headed over to HEY, and unfortunately they have reorganized the danmaku floor such that both of the Mushihime cabinets are side-by-side and facing a place where people can gather and watch. D: I liked having my discreet little side-cabinet to hide on and try to get better away from watchful eyes, but alas it is no more. However, having to play in the new configuration yielded an amazing and rather important discovery! I have been playing the wrong side of the game! I have always been playing as 2P, because I like being 2P for some reason (I blame it on a combination of Jiuna convincing me that Luigi was more desirable to play as because he was green, and coping with Aaron always needing to be 1P). HOWEVER, apparently in Mushihimesama, 1P and 2P are not identical! D: Only on the 1P side do you get the bullet speedup effects according to your combo! So apparently not only have I been playing on the lowest difficulty setting with the auto-bomb mode, I have also been playing the side that does not increase the difficulty of the game tenfold when you manage to avoid dying for any reasonable amount of time. D: I have now moved over to playing 1P, but it's quite slow going getting used to the increased difficulty, and facing the screen from the 1P side is also proving to be more disconcerting than I would have expected. Oh well, now I know how to get the glowy bullets that try harder to kill you... >_< I didn't do so well in terms of advancement through the stages today, but I absolutely trashed all of my previous point records by starting to apply what I've learned about scoring from players I've watched. Of course, getting higher scores means doing crazy things that get you killed, but it's extremely fun, and I think it's actually rather good practice. I find it's helping me memorize the levels better.
After playing the worst round of Mushihime I have ever played in my entire life (I got down to zero lives on the Stage 1 boss, and then subsequently suicided out of shame and despair D:), I decided it was time to eat dinner haha. I had MEGA sauce-katsu-don at Meryl Streep Presents Probably Not Maid Curry again, and it was as good as I remembered. When I get better at Japanese I may have to ask them to lay off on the mayo though. :S After eating I went back to CLUB SEGA 2 to redeem myself in 3rd Strike (no such luck) and then went back to play Mushihime at HEY. When I arrived, both machines were occupied (one guy was actually worse than me! I'm moving up in the world! ;D), so I played... GAUNTLET LEGENDS!!! Oh man, what a trip down memory lane... HEY are not JERKS like all North American arcades, and do not make your life tick down for no reason other than to grab your cash and make you angry and never want to play again. This meant that I actually got to... you know, PLAY THE GAME. >_> It was significantly less exciting than I remember, but it was entertaining nonetheless, and it felt good to hear "BLUE ARCHER NEEDS FOOD BADLY!!!" again haha. I kind of sucked at Mushihime again when I got back at the cabinet, and so maybe it was good that I had the opportunity to play something I don't fail super hard at.
I was apparently Akiba starved, because I played until waaay later than I usually do, and ended up leaving HEY with the intention of going home at like 9:40. When I arrived at Yokochuu at 11, I looked at the bus schedule and found that the last bus to 三崎東岡 (Misakihigashioka, the bus I take) was coming at 11:20! I guess I'm glad that I wasn't doing well at Mushihime and thus stay until 10... Somehow I had remembered there being several buses after 11pm, but apparently that is false.
I got home at about midnight, and made the mistake of watching most of the Skullgirls Evo panel before I remembered that I had to blog. O_O Ouchie, I guess I'm glad that I only have one work day ahead of me before I'm off on my grand adventure. Anyways, that just about wraps it up for today, and I will now bid you good-night.
Night!
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