Taylor Swift

Watanabe is a 19-year-old student we spotted in Harajuku, wearing an all-black goth / gothic lolita outfit.

Her maxi dress with ruffles, her wings handbag, and her retro heels are all from Innocent World. She is also wearing a lace flower headpiece and a velvet jacket.

Watanabe told us that the Japanese gothic labels Innocent World and Millefleurs are her two favorite fashion brands.

Click on any photo to enlarge it.

As is now well documented MAME 0.162 is the first MAME build to officially ship with the MESS drivers included, giving you a whole host of extra capability for absolutely no extra cost on your part.

While this addition is aimed at showing the more serious side of the project it can also be a lot of fun. The big advantage is that you need only configure one emulator, MAME, after which you have, at your fingertips, the ability to run a whole lot more than ever before.

Let’s say you’re a fan of the Raiden series, you’ve likely experienced the original arcade version in MAME a few times, and maybe even recently Raiden 2 / DX which were emulated.

Prior to 0.162 that was the only version of the original Raiden you could run using MAME, for anything else you’d have to use a different emulator such as one of my UME builds, MESS, or various other console / computer emulators.

As of 0.162, without having to look at any other emulator you have the option to do so much more. Raiden had a lot of ports, maybe you weren’t aware of them, let’s look at some of them.

One of the best ports of the original Raiden was the one to the FM Towns / FM Towns Marty. This version, which is documented in the Software List, can be launched with “mame64 fmtmarty raiden” (make sure to use the Marty driver, not the regular FM Towns one, the keyboard / joystick input mappings conflict with each other on the FM Towns by default leading to control issues)

Visually it’s nearly spot on compared to the arcade version, gameplay wise it’s based on the Japanese version so it uses checkpoints, but what really sets it aside from the Arcade is the use of CD Audio for the soundtrack, meaning this game, while playing almost perfectly compared to the arcade also features a brand new arranged soundtrack at CD quality. The only thing it really lacks seems to be a rotation option, which is a shame if you want to run it on a vertical monitor.

From one of the most accurate ports, let’s look at the most stripped down, the Atari Lynx version. Like everything covered here this in the Software List and can be launched with “mame64 lynx raiden”

Obviously this is a port to a very simple handheld system, so it only bares a passing resemblance the the original. It’s interesting in that (to my knowledge) it’s the only handheld port of the game, and actually managed to maintain the look and feel of the original game fairly well once you consider the system they had to work with.

Back to fairly accurate ports let’s look at the Playstation release. This can be launched with “mame64 psu raidenpr” (Only the US version runs, there’s some kind of weird disc protection on the Japanese rips)

The Playstation version contains both Raiden and Raiden 2 (a very good port of Raiden 2 at that, possibly better than our current emulation) but for the purpose of this I’ll focus on Raiden 1. The graphics are the same as those found in the arcade game, it has both Horizontal and Vertical modes for if you want to use a Vertical screen (although you’ll need to remap the controls to play that properly, but MAME’s internal rotation at least makes it very easy to rotate the display)

The PC Engine had 2 releases of Raiden, the original ‘Raiden’ was a regular cartridge game, while Super Raiden was a CD release with full CD soundtrack. Visually these are downgraded a bit from the arcade as it’s a weaker platform, but again they give you a slightly experience as a result.

The launch syntax for Super Raiden is the slightly more complex “mame64 pce -cart scdsys -cdrom sraiden” (because you have to insert the CD cart into the PCE cartridge slot in order to play CD games in the CD drive) For the regular Raiden it’s simply “mame64 pce raiden”

One of the worst ports of Raiden I’ve played is the Atari Jaguar one. While the console should have been more than capable of running a game like Raiden it appears that the company porting it simply created a game that looked a bit like Raiden, but really doesn’t feel much like it at all when you play, everything simply feels a bit off. The Jaguar driver in MAME isn’t very good and doesn’t run many games, but Raiden is relatively undemanding and plays fine. “mame64 jaguar raiden”

The Genesis port is the one I’m more familiar with, the colours are a bit drab compared to some of the others but it plays a good game and is actually one of my favourite shooters on the platform. “mame64 genesis raiden”




The Snes port gives you yet another take on it, visually it’s less drab than the Genesis version, and doesn’t have the side bar obscuring half the view (so in that sense it’s closer to the PCE version) but it does apparently have quite a lot of slowdown. “mame64 snes raiden”

By integrating MESS in 0.162 we’ve given the opportunity for anybody with more than a passing interest in games to dig a bit deeper and see what they can find, to me that’s beautiful and being able to see all these different versions of Raiden without having to switch emulator at all is just pure bliss. I know some people are trying to throw a negative slant on it, and some of the builds that already like to do things we request aren’t done are already stripping out the extra content along with the nag screens (the main one of which was actually already removed in 0.162) but in the end that ends up being their loss, I’ve already read people saying they’re going to migrate away from those builds because they no longer offer the full MAME experience.

There is actually some other stuff that’s brand new to 0.162; emulation of the original Tamagotchi is actually a landmark moment, as a piece of technology it had a huge influence, and the emulation of it is easily as significant as the emulation of the original Pacman arcade, just remember to run it with something like “-prescale 3” to avoid it being a blurry mess.

The Golden Tee Fore! stuff already mentioned is also working in 0.162; if you have performance issues be sure to set the resolution dispwitch to Low, that way a high end i7 should run it without frame drops or audio stuttering.

My message is simple here however; if you’re willing to embrace the changes made to the project, put a bit of effort in to learn how the new content works, have an open mind to explore some of it, and want to get a real insight into the industry back then, including how the arcades and home systems influenced each other, which software houses worked most closely with the original manufacturers to provide accurate ports, and where developers too liberties etc. then the new look MAME 0.162 is likely to be the first step in providing a very worthwhile experience.

If you’re closed-minded, unwilling to accept change, are lazy, or just want to be rebellious on the other hand, I can understand why this might not be for you ;-)

"The web has no gatekeepers. The web has no quality control. The web is a mess. The web is for everyone."  

Onachi quickly caught our eye in Harajuku with traditional Japanese fashion, quirky modern accessories, and two-tone hair.

Onachi is wearing a colorful patterned kimono jacket with a pleated skirt and wooden sandals. Accessories include two Barbie doll heads (one as a hair decoration, the other as a brooch, a giant tassel necklace (like her vivid blush, tassels are often seen in Japan dolly kei subculture), round glasses, and several retro graphic buttons from the Japanese brand Monomania.

Onachi told us that she likes the work of the Japanese designer Keisuke Kanda and she listens to the music of Indigo La End. For more info and pictures, find Onachi on Instagram or Twitter.

Click on any photo to enlarge it.

我々はここ夢が叶うんことを証明するために、この名前新郎にフォートナイトのオタクの称号を授けます…

The folks who maintain MAME (Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator) are aiming to make the project completely open source in order to expand both its pool of supporters and its utility to developers and historians. ...

The strangest thing about Castlevania: Symphony of the Night is how it’s over a decade and a half old and I’m not sick of it. I don’t just mean it’s old but I still like it: I mean I still play it regularly. I don’t think I ever really stopped. I can hardly remember when I didn’t play it. I have no idea how many times I’ve finished it.

I have had some incarnation of it on every platform I have owned whenever compatible, even when it involved irksome fiddling (I’ve never bothered streaming to my PlayStation Vita for any other reason) or special labor (I bought Dracula X Chronicles and persisted through Rondo of Blood only enough to unlock a PSP port of Symphony of the Night). I even bought the Xbox Live Arcade port, and nobody ought to have bought that.

I have played it with every significant relationship partner, and with numerous insignificant ones (ask any good-looking person in a Brooklyn bar at 1:30 AM you wanna go play Castlevania and see if you ever hear no. Trust me). When I first met my current, most significant partner, he determinedly played through Symphony of the Night, insisting on all the subweapons I never used and all the tactics I never took, because he wanted to distinguish himself. We are well into our third year together now.

This is all very strange, because everyone else my age insists that Super Metroid is the better example of the Metroidvania genre—you know, the genre where you go around and see stuff you cannot reach or achieve, and then later you get a special ability someplace else and go oh yeah, and you go all the way back to that thing you couldn’t do before and you do it.

There is nothing like finally unlocking the solid door that proves to you that this area leads to that area after all. Or let’s say you’ve passed by a very high ledge countless times, maybe even over years when you were a kid. And then one day you finally kill a boss—you weren’t thinking about the ledge, just about defeating the enemy—and your prize is that you can now jump twice as high.

So you go what if, and you go back to that immortal ledge, thinking just maybe. And you jump, you double-jump, and for the first time in your life you just slip like butter up onto the ledge, and an entirely new place unscrolls before your eyes, a palace of unopened presents and brand new and unmapped rooms.

That’s what they mean when they say Metroidvania. They don’t say Castlevoid or Castleroid for a reason. But I always thought Super Metroid felt sterile, too orderly. It’s going for the Alien-inspired lonesomeness of space, of course, but I never bought into it, with all that rolling around like a little Nintendo rubber ball, pooping those tiny mines everywhere, waving my gun arm around. Collecting items. Too clean.

By contrast, Symphony of the Night is a sprawling, atmospheric harpsichord concerto, a catacomb of inexplicable spaces, impeccable visual style and uncountable secrets. You play as Alucard, a half-vampire with beautifully-animated hair and a cape. Alucard wakes up from a long, self-imposed sleep because his father Dracula has re-emerged, and this time the anticipated vampire hunter hasn't shown up for the regular centennial Dracula beat-down. So it's up to you.

According to the Castlevania universe, when Dracula is summoned, so too is his castle. You smash Dracula’s candelabras and enter his guest houses and destroy all his demon friends. You eat his old food. You are a son wandering through your father’s deserted chapels, with their high-glass rainbows and arrow-wielding nightmare seraphs. From his parapet you can use his spyglass to watch his boatman. You solicit help from Dracula's librarian, who reluctantly agrees, because it's your house, too.

And eventually you learn all his old spells. In forgotten holes you find a tiny emblem called Power of Sire. In a sense, the castle is your father; you’re in your own family home, at war with some part of your nature that’s ill and decadent, a part that you feel morally responsible for defeating. You are, we presume, the only one who can.

The bestiary is terse and massive, and so is the list of arms and accessories. Some of them are so rare you might never find them, and then they have secret moves if you know what to press. There are secrets on top of secrets.

In fact, every time I play Symphony of the Night, I find something I’ve never seen before. Everytime I let a friend play it there’s always at least one moment where a never-before-seen drop occurs and I bolt forward, going wait, what’s that, and the friend gets to be a little delighted at his accidental success.

There are more than 40 items of food and most of them replenish inconsequential amounts of health. The food is just part of the story, in its way. You are in a rotting baroque castle, and you break open a staircase and a turkey falls out. You find a hidden room at the end of a long corridor where a gravekeeper is alone with a lovely green tea set. Eating it is not the point.

If you manage to find some peanuts, you can toss them up and catch them. You don’t need to. But you can, if you get the timing just right.

The voice acting is all oddly bad, sepulchral and morose, like it comes from disembodied heads. The great living castle is full of chairs. You can sit in them, Alucard, the elegant, disdainful prodigal son. It does nothing, but it matters that you can—looking classic and tortured among Dad’s gross decor. You are an elegant, petulant young dhampir and you can do whatever you want.

There are beautiful, topless young women that suddenly erupt from the hearts of roses. If you pause to stare, they run you through with thorns. Many of the demons of Dracula’s castle are beautiful, like the sexy succubus who pretends to be Alucard’s human mother, to trick him.

At one part there’s a confessional booth, with a chair that faces the curtain, and if you go and sit down a ghostly figure appears and enters opposite you. Then usually a fusillade of sharp weapons erupts unexpectedly from the confessional and you die.

If you get a GAME OVER screen, the caption says Let us go out this night for pleasure. The night is still young, scripted elegantly beneath a cow skull. What kind of pleasure? Does Alucard, like, give into his dark side if he loses his life in his father’s world? Ooh.

You can “one hundred percent” complete Super Metroid. You get all the items and you see everything and that’s it. Symphony of the Night’s max completion percentage is 200.6%, for goodness’ sake.

I guess the fact I’m not sick of it is not that strange after all.

Director Koji Igarashi says he wants to make us another one like that, and in just a couple days he’s raised over a million dollars on Kickstarter. Apparently he has wanted to make another one like that for a long time and all the thousand little bureaucratic indignities of traditional risk-averse corporate game development in Japan had been getting in the way.

It’s very rare for a Japanese game developer like Igarashi to go indie. I’m so excited for him. Everyone deserves to be in charge of their legacy; in a way, I think that’s what Symphony of the Night has always been about.

My friends are kind of worried about how it’s going to come out and what if it’s not good and all of that fan stuff. There is a lot of justified reservation about traditional game developers raising huge Kickstarter hauls. But it doesn’t matter to me, really. Either way I’ll keep playing Symphony of the Night. Probably always will.

There is nothing quite like that feeling: you, a blinking light on an uncharted section of your map, making the dark spaces light, unyielding til you touch every corner, find every hidden room, every breakable stone.There’s nothing else like it; knowing, then, that your world, your life, is not made up of discrete “stages”, but rather is infinite and interconnected, even if you don’t understand all the connections yet.

You can go back, and you can kill the demons, and dig up the secrets, and then you can get out.

Here are a few of the most hilarious, appalling, or just straight-up outrageous moments in Twitch history.

Maro is a regular around the streets of Harajuku, and has been on and off for several years.

When we met him this time, Maro was wearing a handpainted Pikachu jacket over a resale top, hand-ripped jeans over graphic tights, and Union Jack Dr. Martens boots. His goggles and bag – both Pokemon themed like the jacket – are also hand-customized.

Maro’s favorite fashion brand is Shimokitazawa Killers and he’s a fan of the Sex Pistols. For more info, find Maro on Twitter or Facebook!

Click on any photo to enlarge it.

47MB download and slow as hell, but crazy impressive  

As an addendum to an earlier post today, here’s how my CHR station ranked the songs of 1988. Regional oddities abound (Elisa Fiorillo! Stryper! Will to Power!), not to mention the unsurprising #1.

Former Konami staff speak about a cancelled mid '90s console: "While it was in development, it seems that we got word of the Sony PlayStation and we shifted our direction into providing games for it." ...

Castlevania: Symphony of the Night's Koji "IGA" Igarashi has finally confirmed a new metroidvania: Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night. We speak to him about his journey toward independence, and the new game. ...

In its opening screen, Royals describes itself as an "optimistic peasant simulator." This turns out to be a rather grim tagline, given how unlikely it is that your character will ever make it past age 30.

Royals is the latest game from Asher Vollmer, best known as the designer of the enormously popular puzzler Threes, but it couldn't be more different. With its rudimentary 1-bit graphics and inscrutable gameplay, Royals looks like the sort of game you might have played off of a floppy disk in the 1980s.

Indeed, it imagines itself as "an old forgotten game from your youth," where you've lost the manual and don't know what to do except dive in and start playing.

You begin as a 12-year-old peasant with unusually lofty dreams: to become a member of the royal family. Again, it's not exactly clear how you're going to do this, although you can build, work, explore, and acquire followers to do your bidding.

But spend your time wisely. The life of a peasant might be cheap, but as is often the case in poverty, that also means that it's incredibly expensive—almost every choice you make literally takes a year off of your life.

Want to become more charismatic? Go meditate in the mountains. Want to become more powerful and challenge the king's armies? Spend a year running free in the forest. Just remember that no matter what you do, you're going to die young. That's freeing in a way; there's no real penalty for experimentation when your life is but a fleeting candle.

Hell, I'm not even sure if there's any way to win the game. Maybe your peasant is just a dreamer doomed to fly too close to the sun! I've messed around with it for a few hours, and most of the fun is exploring—not just the physical space of the game, but what it means and how it works in the absence of any instructions.

It's easy to forget how pleasurable that lack of knowledge could be, back in the early days of video games: the feeling of finding yourself stranded in a highly abstract digital world where the rules were uncertain and there was no map except the one you made. Go play Royals, and remember.

(It's free to download or pay-what-you want.)

In the mid-1990s, Theresa Duncan's works went beyond just 'games for girls' -- charming games like Chop Suey, Smarty and Zero Zero were rueful and unusual, with a distinct Gen X flavor, portraying young womanhood in all its weirdness and touching complexity. The pioneering Duncan died in 2007, but now there's a new group of small games in tribute to her work.

Rachel Weil's FEMICOM Museum is hosting a series of jams on femininity and games (read my Guardian profile of Weil's awesome work in this arena). The first of these is a tribute to Theresa Duncan, and you can navigate all the submissions here. Many are playable right in your browser and have cute music.

Among others, there's Weil's own Honeysuckle, a sweet backyard exploration game set in a simulated old Windows environment for effect, Alienmelon's 'interactive bedtime story' and a printable divination foldable from Kara Stone, whom you might remember from our piece on the great fortunetellers of cyberspace.

Like Duncan's games, all the jam titles have a tone that's both playful and intimate, treating the presumed audience of young women as intelligent and curious adults. Both Weil's work with the FEMICOM Museum and the portfolio of Theresa Duncan share an important thing in common: The idea that feminine aesthetics in games don't have to be valueless or cheap, that girlhood is an experience that should be respected in the canon of "retro" fandom.

Rhizome, a New Museum-affiliated art group, recently held a fundraiser dedicated to the preservation of Duncan's games (I covered it here and backed it).

Thanks to Rhizome's work, you can now play Chop Suey, Smarty and Zero Zero online, and join an important part of feminist game history that would be hailed as pioneering and inventive even if released for the first time today.

Popular gets to “Lady (Hear Me Tonight),” a much bigger hit in the UK but in Miami got heavy rotation on Power 96 around the holidays; I often heard it preceded or followed by Daft Punk’s “One More Time,” another hit much bigger locally than nationally (and
Stardust’s “Music Sounds Better With You” did get mainstream airplay here). Already a Chic fan, I felt clever and special and gay for catching the “Soup For One” sample. Their last Hot 100-charting single has an enervated groove, the soundtrack to a reveler out too late whose wrinkles are showing and hangovers are worsening. By contrast Modjo accelerate and pitch-alter Nile Rodgers’ lick so that “Lady (Hear Me Tonight)” emits a rictus grinned energy that bears the same relation to euphoria as anxiety does to excitement — a recasting of the scenario in Chic’s “My Feet Keep Dancing.”

The summery vibe extends to the video, in which two dudes and a girl use their coolness to mow through a rural town and cap the experience by sleeping together (a commenter: “The girl is the most French looking person I’ve ever seen”).

Voters respect honesty even if they won’t vote for a candidate. This works:

STEPHANOPOULOS: So does that mean that Hillary Clinton is part of the billionaire class?

SANDERS: It means that Hillary Clinton has been part of the political establishment for many, many years. I have known Hillary for some 25 years. I respect her and I like her, but I think what the American people are saying, George, is that at a time when 99 percent of all new income is going to the top 1 percent, and when the top 0.1 percent owns almost as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent, maybe it’s time for a real political shakeup in this country and go beyond establishment politics.

STEPHANOPOULOS: You are asking for a lot of shakeup. Is it really possible for someone who calls himself a socialist to be elected president of the United States?

SANDERS: Well, so long as we know what democratic socialism is. And if we know that in countries, in Scandinavia, like Denmark, Norway, Sweden, they are very democratic countries, obviously. The voter turnout is a lot higher than it is in the United States. In those countries, health care is the right of all people. And in those countries, college education, graduate school is free. In those countries, retirement benefits, childcare are stronger than in the United States of America. And in those countries, by and large, government works for ordinary people and the middle class, rather than, as is the case right now in our country, for the billionaire class.

STEPHANOPOULOS: I can hear the Republican attack ad right now. He wants American to look more like Scandinavia.

SANDERS: That’s right. That’s right. And what’s wrong with that? What’s wrong when you have more income and wealth equality? What’s wrong when they have a stronger middle class in many ways than we do, higher minimum wage than we do, and they are stronger on the environment than we do?

American media are reluctant to handle more than two candidates at a time, but Clinton coverage is getting dull. Although Sanders doesn’t have a chance, so long as he keeps mentioning retirement benefits, poor income, and childcare HRC must too.

Another reason why we need pressure from Bernie Sanders and the left wing of the Democratic Party is to push back against the corporate pressure that motivates much of the Democratic political class. Delaware governor Jack Markell is the perfect example of this, as his Atlantic piece is nothing but a restatement of centrist, pro-business, DLC shibboleths as solutions for the problems we face. The Trans-Pacific Partnership will be great for the American working class! I’m willing to sign a bill to raise my state’s minimum wage to a whopping $8.25, but only if we have financial counseling at places of employment so workers can figure out that they need 2 jobs to survive on that salary!! And maybe, after letting corporations set the agenda, we will beg them to stop inversion mergers that allow them to get away with paying virtually no taxes in the United States!!!

Markell can smugly dismiss populism, Occupy, protest, and economic activism all he wants to but his way has led to the New Gilded Age and I’m glad to see more Americans seriously questioning if not rejecting the pro-corporate approach to American politics.

"Friendly tag-based Javascript animators" JADSDS have made a gigantic HMTL5 map of the overworld from The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, also known as the best Zelda. Though it takes a while to load, it's well worth it.

You can see the massive kingdom and all its tiny lurking enemies, characters, palaces and waterfalls. Remember playing it as a kid and feeling like the whole world was enormous, like you could never see all its secrets? Zoom all the way out and see the whole world in your browser, or in to watch everything move around in the orbits you remember. Pretty neat.

There are some more fun classic animations to play with on the JADSDS website. Thanks to Kotaku for scouting this off Reddit, and for recommending you try the map on mobile!

The political terrain since Teflon Ron and heir Bill Clinton has shifted rightwards so gradually that what once seemed bedrock Democratic philosophy looks like lunacy through the Coke bottle lens of the Beltway commentariat. Actually, I’ve heard little chatter about Bernie Sanders outside liberal blogs. This must mean the chattering class has decided he hasn’t a chance in hell. Bits of his platform:

He’s a longtime supporter of universal health care in what some would say is its purest form: A single-payer system, in which the government provides insurance directly rather than subsidizing private insurers. He’s called for making taxpayer-funded child care available to all parents, right up through kindergarten. He supports breaking up the big banks and imposing a carbon tax to slow climate change. He opposes trade deals, including the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership, that lack what he considers adequate protection for labor. And he supports the public financing of campaigns for federal office.

Some of these ideas are more popular than others. How you feel about them will depend, inevitably, on your own ideological predispositions and, to some extent, how you interpret available evidence on their effectiveness. But none of these ideas is loopy. Most Western democracies have some of these policies, while some Western democracies have all of them.

Now compare Sanders’ platform to Theodore Roosevelt’s Bull Moose declaration of principles:

The fixing of minimum safety and health standards for the various occupations, and the exercise of the public authority of State and Nation, including the Federal control over inter-State commerce and the taxing power, to maintain such standards;

The prohibition of child labor;

Minimum wage standards for working women, to provide a living scale in all industrial occupations;

The prohibition of night work for women and the establishment of an eight hour day for women and young persons;

One day’s rest in seven for all wage-workers;

The abolition of the convict contract labor system; substituting a system of prison production for governmental consumption only; and the application of prisoners’ earnings to the support of their dependent families;

Publicity as to wages, hours and conditions and labor; full reports upon industrial accidents and diseases, and the opening to public inspection of all tallies, weights, measures and check systems on labor products;

Standards of compensation for death by industrial accident and injury and trade diseases which will transfer the burden of lost earnings from the families of working people to the industry, and thus to the community;

The protection of home life against the hazards of sickness, irregular employment and old age through the adoption of a system of social insurance adapted to American use;

Sounds horrifying, right?

The last presidential gadfly to emerge from the wilds of Vermont was Howard Dean, and in retrospect his primary defeat looks less like a quixotic loss to position him as a cable news green room habitue than preparing the local Democratic Party for the renewed interest in the poor (and he’s sounder on foreign policy than I thought; I’m officially sorry). With Elizabeth Warren playing smart and not running, Sanders projects the right what-can-I-lose air.

Thousands of classic games from Prince of Persia to Wolfenstein 3D are available for free on the Internet Archive, and now you can embed and play them directly inside of individual tweets.

The Internet Archive, a non-profit group devoted to preserving the history of the internet, has long hosted an online treasure trove of thousands of free, playable video games ranging from arcade titles to MS-DOS adventures. (Check our a recent talk by one of their archivists at the recent Game Developer's Conference.)

But now, you can do more than simply play these games for free; you can actually embed and play them directly inside of tweets by simply posting the link. Check out a few of the games in the embedded tweets below, or head to the Internet Archive to try it out for yourself. the tweets below for examples, or try it out yourself.

Preservation goes social, as old games can now be shared socially thanks to a new feature of The Internet Archive. ...

Ohanamurasaki is a girl with a dark style – including a graphic print face mask – who we snapped on the street in Harajuku.

Ohanamurasaki is wearing a layered outfit with many pieces she made herself (her personal brand is called Trapeze) along with studded creepers with buckles. Her tote bag is by the Japanese post punk bands Plasticzooms x Lillies and Remains. She is also wearing an oversized character ring and white heart choker.

Click on any photo to enlarge it.

The works of Mason Lindroth have a distinctive look and texture—clay-like blobs and gradients, cranked through a 1990s Macintosh computer screen. The play-doh colors, visual flecks and alien sounds of his latest work, Melter, will take you straight back to the days of Liquid Television on MTV.

I first discovered Lindroth's unusual games via writer Chris Priestman, who describes Melter like this:

His latest playable creation feels like a tribute to his favorite material: how it can stretched, wound, squeezed, and pulled apart. It's also the most videogame of his videogames. You have three levels to beat. In each of them you must travel to a distant, unseeable point to collect a spinning medallion. There are enemies that patrol paths, others that shoot red balls of clay at you, and large triangular spikes to avoid. This is Lindroth bringing his style to a traditional platformer and seeing what it would look like.

I think I prefer Lindroth's less conventional works. While Melter was made for Ludum Dare 32 (theme: Unconventional Weapons, and our own Laura Hudson took part), his submission to Ludum Dare 31, Mossnaso, felt startlingly familiar, like looking at the face of an adult to suddenly realize they were your childhood friend.

Mossnaso doesn't make me think of clay, but rather of the vividly-shaded shapes and textures of the ancient Macintosh shareware I played growing up: Hard discs full of weird files, System 7 sounds, black and white flashes and inscrutable designs. There is a room in Mossnaso's surreal world that reminds me of nothing so much as the throbbing intestine from 1988's Life & Death on which I performed point-and-click operations as a strange child.

If you have any loving memory for the independent Mac games and HyperCard stacks of the late 1980s and early 1990s, Mossnasso is worth a few minutes of your time. And so is award-winning Journaliere, full of surreal jarring angles, classic textures and mesmerizing television static.

Both Melter and Mossnaso are free to play in your browser; check out more Mason Lindroth games at his website.

Fair to say we miss Kyary…

[Video][Website]
[5.75]

Patrick St. Michel: When it was announced Natsume Mito would become a singer as well as model, I was worried this would end up being too similar to a certain other fashion-oriented person gone pop star, as they also had the same management company and producer. It’s nice, then, that “Maegami Kiri Sugita” establishes a unique image for her and works as a nice bit of fluffy pop too. It has the same playroom vibe as a lot of Kyary Pamyu Pamyu’s early music, but whereas even Kyary’s early music could be subtly focused, Mito just goofs around. She’s been described as representing producer Yasutaka Nakata’s sound, “but from Kansai,” the region to the west of Tokyo, considered far more laid-back than the stiff, unwelcoming capital. Kyary has always eyed national attention, and her songs often revolve around the fear of growing up, but Mito just lets it lay out, and “Maegami Kiri Sugita” is just about getting a sorta shitty haircut and dealing with it.
[8]

Megan Harrington: I did this right before my college graduation and I wound up having to put about a half cup of L.A. Looks hair gel in my hair to turn my combed back baby bangs to rock cement and then carefully crowning the sculpture with a Blair Waldorf headband. I was not half so pleasant as Natsume Mito that day.  
[7]

Iain Mew: I’m not sure this is sonically distinct enough from Kyary Pamyu Pamyu for Natsume Mito’s career. She brings a heavier kind of presence that cuts against the playroom keyboard squelches well, though, and “choki choki” is a better and happier hook than Kyary’s had for a while.
[7]

Alfred Soto: The keyboard solo and “choki choki” hook are stick-like-glue good, but it’s a minute too long. Not much different from Kyary Pamyu Pamyu either.
[5]

Katherine St Asaph: I appear to be trapped inside the Tiny Toons Anvil Chorus, except they’re all pink and pound twice as hard.
[2]

Brad Shoup: This is one of those few times I’ll recommend you listen to something on laptop speakers, so that Mito is trying that much harder to connect to you, and the torturous choki chokis lose focus, becoming more of a rhythm element instead. 
[5]

Maxwell Cavaseno: I don’t know if it’s the fact that I have a fever or if it’s because this is typical of songs affiliated with the Yasutaka Nakata brand of “Breh, this sounds like I’m entering a pharmacy on the Game Boy.” But I am pleasantly bemused while possibly quite deliberately isolated and unsure of myself. Just… where is aisle five, so I can get rid of this cold?
[6]

Cédric Le Merrer: Yasutaka Nakata phoning it in is still enjoyable, but ever less so.
[6]

gagalupe:

“President Obama thanks Japan’s prime minister for karaoke, anime and emojis”
[youtube]

Konami has confirmed plans to scrap development of its upcoming Hideo Kojima-Guillermo del Toro collaboration Silent Hills and pull its innovative demo/announcement P.T. from the PlayStation Network. ...