Tag: video games

あなたの助け舟

It’s the 13th of August and I’m feeling gooood. That means I should help someone else feel good, right? Okay.

You know how I was talking about JPSEEK the other day? After footling around on their site a bit more, I discovered they also have Japanese magazines and stuff (mostly fashion), up for download.* I like fashion, in a look but don’t touch kind of way. Meaning I could browse a fashion magazine for hours but when I get up I’m going to put on the same old jeans and t-shirt and walk out of the house like that. Money must be spent on video games, know what I mean? Speaking of which, Fire Emblem Shin Ankoku Ryuu!! But that’s a subject for another post.

So, by dint of hard work (and Babelfish), I have found for you the location of these downloadable magazines: here. You have to register, and then you have to post in the thread before you can see the link, but hey, it’s better than paying for it, right? I’m such a nice person, though,
that I’ll give you a freebie: the August edition of Vivi magazine (jpseekers don’t get mad at me, we’re all pirates together). You notice they’re hosting their files on www.fs2you.com. Why u do dis? It’s not the most reliable of sites and may occasionally seem to be down. If it seems to be
down, try updating your hosts file with these:

59.63.157.25        www.fs2you.com
222.169.230.101        dyn.www.fs2you.com
59.32.232.195 cachefile1.fs2you.com
222.169.230.98 cachefile2.fs2you.com
221.204.246.79 cachefile3.fs2you.com
61.150.85.80 cachefile4.fs2you.com
60.2.139.27 cachefile5.fs2you.com
61.184.189.10 cachefile6.fs2you.com
61.174.62.132 cachefile7.fs2you.com
58.211.75.49 cachefile8.fs2you.com
61.134.84.238 cachefile9.fs2you.com
61.156.40.181 cachefile10.fs2you.com
218.75.151.4 cachefile11.fs2you.com
58.211.75.31 cachefile12.fs2you.com
124.94.101.133 cachefile13.fs2you.com
221.204.246.115 cachefile14.fs2you.com
218.75.151.10 cachefile15.fs2you.com
58.218.209.126 cachefile16.fs2you.com
61.157.152.173 cachefile17.fs2you.com
125.46.41.27 cachefile18.fs2you.com
125.91.11.223 cachefile19.fs2you.com
59.53.48.134 cachefile20.fs2you.com
59.53.48.136 cachefile21.fs2you.com
59.53.48.144 cachefile22.fs2you.com
61.139.106.204 cachefile23.fs2you.com
59.53.48.172 cachefile24.fs2you.com
124.94.101.146 cachefile25.fs2you.com
61.166.111.227 cachefile26.fs2you.com
How do you do that, you ask? Go to C:/Windows/System32/drivers/etc. You see a file called “hosts”? Open it up with Notepad. Copy and paste the above at the bottom (under localhost). Save and close. Now try the link again. Ta-daaa! No need to thank me, just send money.

*Flipping through fashion mags is not clinically proven to improve your Japanese, seeing as you’re staring at pictures 95% of the time. Reader discretion is advised.

And that’s all for today!

Edit: All of a sudden fs2you is asking you to install something called Raysource before it will let you download larger files. Like hell we will. Take your crappy filesharing system and stuff it where the sun don’t shine. Thank goodness I milked it for what it was worth when I had the chance.

The Fifth Elephant book review

Well “The Fifth Elephant” by Terry Pratchett turned out to be a terrible book as far as Discworld novels go. Among the bad Discworld books it’s slightly above Monstrous Regiment and slightly below Men at Arms, about on par with Night Watch. You know, I don’t think Terry Pratchett has got it any more. Or maybe I’m just too used to him now. Or maybe it’s the Spirit of Japanese, punishing me for daring to stray from the path of immersion.

Anyway, this is a blog about Japanese, not a blog about books (English ones, at that) so let’s get back to the point, which is… GAMES. To be precise, Ar Tonelico 2 and Mana Khemia 2. I should be buying stock in Gust right about now, really. I can hardly wait for the weekend to start so I can sink my teeth into them. Which one should go first? I enjoyed AT more, so maybe I should keep the best for last? Then again why suffer through MK2 when the first Mana Khemia wasn’t really up to scratch? It was made after AT and it had worse graphics, can you believe that? Okay, so it’s settled. Ar Tonelico 2 it is. At least it will keep me occupied (and learning Japanese) until Fire Emblem DS comes out on 7th August.

じゃ、今日はここまで。

Japanese puts me to sleep

I mentioned the other day about having difficulty finding interesting articles to read in Japanese. It gets worse than that: just an hour ago around 2:00pm, I was listening to Web JOQR Internet Radio (WMP9 can get it for you) and there was this Katou Emiri girl hosting a show… aaah, she’s trying so hard but it was so dull, dull, dull! I’ve never really liked radio that much and she wasn’t really talking about anything relevant to my interests. Within a few minutes my head dropped off to the side and zzzzzzzzzz…. until 3:39pm. AT WORK! My image is ruined~!… is what I want to say but nobody really cares. Except me. I gotta find more interesting things to listen to, and soon.

Same with articles, I’ve gotten really tired of Mainichi Daily. They never have any delicious news running or anything, it’s always the same old, same old. I’m used to my news being “juicier” and full of casual gossip and opinions. The boring, professional (yeah, I admit it’s professional) A did this and B did this and C went there is just not working for me. Even their game reviews and stuff are almost overwhelmingly positive, no matter how good or bad the game is. Yomiuri Daily is even worse. For today I’m trying Yahoo Japan and Famitsu‘s website. YJ is a bit of a failure. But Famitsu has some potential, at least for a day or two, until I find a more opinionated site. There’s a new game coming out for the DS, Steel Princess. I’ll keep an eye out for it.

That’s all for today.

Still learning Japanese, yay.

I love it when I learn something worthwhile. Like I learned 喜怒哀楽(きどあいらく）not too long ago and now it’s showing up in just about every article I read. Like this one, about 6 lines down. When you first learn something sometimes it seems so rare and exotic, like “When am I ever going to see this word again?” so it’s always fun to realize it’s actually a common phrase, yay.

As for the rest of my Japanese studies, it’s going…well, I guess? I’m almost done with that interfering little Fire Emblem and this time I promise my next game will be in Japanese (sorry Grandia Extreme!). What I’m suffering from right now is a lack of things to read. I’ve grown tired of many of the things I used to like about Japanese culture like anime and manga so all I have left to read are videogame and music articles, and the occasional news item. I need to diversify, but nothing else interests me about Japan or the Japanese. Well, videogames and music will keep me occupied for the time being and then we’ll see where to go from there.

Video games

If you have to cheat, at least make it enjoyable cheating, right? I’d play Fire Emblem: Goddess of Dawn in Japanese if I could, but since all I have is the English version and an English Wii, no way am I going to deny myself my right to delicious rock-paper-scissors disguised as a strategy game. Part 1 is the most annoying part of any FE I’ve ever played to date but thankfully I’m almost done with. So long as I get to kill that stupid cheating Black Knight again in the end, I’m cool.

Still this doesn’t change the fact that I’m devoting a considerable amount of time to a game that is not furthering my studies of Japanese in any way, shape or form. So to counterbalance that, I’m also playing Rune Factory 2 on my DS. Actually I’ve been playing it fitfully for a while, but the restrictive nature of the Kyle parts has got me rather down. The second generation is better in terms of things to do, but the main character just isn’t a patch on cute little Kyle so it’s a bit of a dilemma. Why they couldn’t just skip the whole second generation thing and keep Kyle throughout I will never figure out.

So I’m enjoying the game, but am I learning anything? Quite a lot, actually. In the beginning I thought I’d take my DS over to the computer and enter sentences into the SRS as I played, but it’s a very tedious and slow process, not recommended in the least. So now I just play the game like I would any other. Occasionally a rather tricky kanji comes up and I note it down for future checking, but other than that I’m breezing through. It’s important to me to get my Japanese to the point where it feels just like English to me, and playing through games without constantly running to the dictionary is part of that for me. What I am thinking of doing, though, is seeing if I can find a script of the game, or at least a comprehensive FAQ in Japanese, and then ripping the sentences from there. I’ll get round to that…some day. And that’s all for today.