Taylor Swift

JP asked this question quite a while back about Super Mario World, one of my all-time favorite games. Here’s the query:

I was watching a speed run of Super Mario World, and I noticed in the “Special World” (the world accessed by completing the Star Road), all of the names of the levels are typical 90′s American Surfer lingo (“tubular, mondo, outrageous”).

I was wondering what the level names are in the Japanese version.

So let’s take a look at them all side-by-side:

Fun Course	Gnarly

Fun Course	Tubular

Even the Mario Staff is Shocked Course	Way Cool

Even the Mario Staff is Shocked Course	Awesome

Specialists' Course	Groovy

Specialists' Course	Mondo

Championship Course	Outrageous

Championship Course	Funky

Neat! So it looks like the Japanese names weren’t anything too radical or funky, they’re mostly ordinary-sounding names. What’s more, each special course name gets used twice in the Japanese version, which is a bit confusing. They don’t even have numbers, like “Fun Course 1″ or “Fun Course 2″.

I also had a couple random thoughts when looking through these:

• It’s interesting that the Super Famicom logo was used in the English version of the game, or at least the American version of the game. I think the European logo might be the same as the Japanese logo, so maybe it wasn’t so out of place there. But I’m almost certain the American Super NES logo was something gray and black and a little different from this.
• I wonder why the localizers decided to use these slang terms in the first place. I don’t usually think of words like “gnarly” and “radical” when playing Mario games
• I wonder what other similar slang words from the era could be used too. I think “So Bad” would’ve been a cool nod to the era AND to The Wizard… but I wonder what other terms could’ve been used too. If you have any ideas, share them in the comments!

So there you go! The Japanese names are pretty basic and simple and get the job done… but the English version is totally wicked to the max!

UPDATE: A reader on Twitter named “ahdummy” asked a great follow-up question too – what does the “YOU ARE A SUPER PLAYER!!” line at the end of the final special course say in Japanese?

Here’s a look at the original Japanese version:

And here’s the English version:

It looks like Nintendo’s localizers took the time to fix even this secret little thing by giving it proper grammar! It also means that people playing the English version can get a few more coins than Japanese players. Interesting!

Malico is a friendly girl with an eye-catching look who we met near Bunka Fashion College in Shinjuku.

Malico is wearing a KTZ big heart emblem dress with black tights and black Tokyo Bopper studded platforms. Accessories include sunglasses and a KTZ backpack.

For more info on Malico, check out her personal Twitter or follow her on Instagram.

Click on any photo to enlarge it.

We met Gyan, Auri, and Satou at Bunka Fashion College in Shinjuku. Their unique fashion and styling caught our eye right away!

Gyan – on the left with a hat, vivid lipstick, and cool circle lenses – is an 18-year-old student. Her look features a deconstructed bomber jacket which she picked up resale and paired with a Uniqlo manga-print top, a pleated OTOE maxi-skirt, red socks, and Tokyo Bopper ribbon platform shoes. Her oversized tote bag with a fringe bottom is handmade. Gyan told us that her favorite brands include OTOE and Tokyo Bopper. Find her on Twitter for more info!

Auri – in the middle with middle with red lipstick and black hair – is 17 years old, and a student. Auri’s look includes an oversized red sweater (check the length of the sleeves!) that she bought resale with a long red skirt (also resale), and resale traditional sandals worn with socks. Accessories include a cute necklace, a rope belt, and a Kuro Benz tote bag decorated with illustrated buttons. Auri’s favorite fashion sources include Hikari and Kuro Benz and she enjoys the music of Ginnan Boyz. Follow Auri on Twitter to find out more about her life.

On the right with the cool hairstyle and lip piercings is 18-year-old Satou, also a student. He’s wearing a long Kuro Benz top over bottoms from ADD Nagano (ADD is Japanese brand Banal Chic Bizarre’s boutique) and traditional geta sandals. Satou’s Banal Chic Bizarre bag (which he said is from “Banzai”) is decorated with Doraemon and other charms. His favorite brand is Kuro Benz and he also listens to the Japanese rock band Ginnan Boyz. Satou is active on Twitter here.

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Our valued commenter Murc took a job at Macy’s. When he was hired, the company gave him a lovely anti-union pamphlet. He then sent it to me. I have photographed and it and am providing it for you to see. You’ll notice a couple of things. First, while such a pamphlet is legal, it’s brimming with half-truths about unions that are intended to do a combination of scaring workers and making them think a union is a waste of their time and money. The highlight for me is when Macy’s says a union can’t guarantee workers benefits; technically true but what it really shows is just that Macy’s is going to refuse to negotiate for higher wages with a union. After all, “neither party is required to make a concession.” Ah. My second favorite line is about how workers once needed unions but “Today, workers no longer need a group to fight for these rights. They are guaranteed by law.” If I was drinking water when reading then, I would have done a spit take. Anyway, the more we publicize the anti-union activities that goes on behind the scenes, the better. I just am showing the text side of the pamphlet, which has most of the good stuff.

Now, I don’t think there is any kind of campaign to organize department store workers, at least nothing I know of. But remember, you don’t have to pay a union money to work here. Of course, without a union you won’t actually make any money.

more random goodness from Darius Kazemi using the Wordnik API  

Here’s some of my rough slogan work for United Airlines

TokyoFashion.com’s newest street snap photographer Eevi spotted 19-year-old Bunka Fashion College student Yuki on the street in Koenji. You might recognized Yuki from her previous street snaps in Harajuku.

In addition to her cute hairstyle, Yuki is wearing a resale animal-print top with resale polka dot pants and pink mouton boots that she picked up a a flea market. Accessories – some of which came from Bubbles Harajuku, The Disney Store, and Mugendo – include several earrings, a star necklace, a beaded ring, a large glass ring, a yin-yang ring, and a camo backpack from Topshop.

Yuki told us that her favorite shop is Dog Harajuku. For more information, you can follow her personal Twitter or Instagram.

Click on any photo to enlarge it.

Today’s feature revolves around two inventions that have nearly been lost to the sands of time: game manuals and telephones. Developers used to be able to presume of gamers some willingness to study, so instead of making their games as idiotic as possible they packaged them with instruction manuals. I’ve got a big box full of these paper relics, many of them more fun to browse than their respective games are to play.

Phones, if you’ll recall, were originally for voice chat–with people other than your parents, even. Back in the ’90s plenty of developers did their own tech support in-house, and before everyone had Internet access they published their phone numbers for people to call in.

Somehow I got to wondering: which game manual has the oldest still functional phone number? So I spent a whole afternoon browsing my manuals’ fine print for digits, dialing them and recording the results. It was tedious work: there was no telling if any given manual would even contain a phone number, much less on which page to find it. Then I had to omit duplicate numbers derived from different manuals but from the same developer or publisher.

I wasn’t expecting much, seeing as how most of the companies represented in my box-o-manuals either closed shop or got bought out long ago. The results are interesting for their predictability–a sad testament to studios long dead. Here they all are, presented in the same order I called them.

Developer: Microprose. Source: X-Com: UFO Defense manual, 1994. Result: no answer.

Developer: Microprose. Source: Falcon 4.0 manual, 1998. Result: wrong number; diabetes care clinic.

Developer: Impressions Software. Source: Lords of the Realm manual, 1994. Result: fax machine registered to Biomed Realty Trust.

Publisher: Interactive Magic. Source: Great Battles of Caesar manual, 1997. Result: generic voicemail.

Publisher: Activision. Source: Quake II manual, 1997.

• Result: A machine answers and asks twice that I confirm my call does not pertain to the Call of Duty franchise. I do so confirm; I do so confirm a second time. After a brief wait a human tech comes on the line. I ask if he’d be willing to troubleshoot Quake II for me; he says although he isn’t trained on that game, since Activision sold it he feels obliged to do his best. Good man!

Developer: Apogee Software. Source: Wolfenstein 3D Hint Manual, 1992. Result: wrong number; Guardian Health Care company.

Publisher: Sierra On-Line. Source: Half-Life manual, 1998. Result: busy signal.

Publisher: Sierra On-Line. Source: A-10 Tank Killer manual, 1989. Result: generic voicemail.

Publisher: Ubisoft. Source: Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six manual.

• Result: After a short wait I get a human tech. I ask him how long this phone number has been in service. He says he’s got a Rayman sticker on his desk copyright 1995, so the number goes at least that far back. He sounds really proud of his Rayman sticker. I tell him I’m proud of him.

Developer: LucasArts. Source: Star Wars: Dark Forces manual, 1995. Result: number disconnected.

Developer: TalonSoft. Source: 12 O’Clock High manual, 1999. Result: number not in service, but an AI offered to connect me to one of two computer shops in the area. How did it know my call had anything to do with computers? Somehow a vestige of TalonSoft remains, like a wisp of smoke on the wind.

Developer: Blizzard. Source: Diablo manual, 1996.

• Result: “Thank you for calling Blizzard customer support. For assistance, please visit battle.net forward-slash support.” This messages then repeats about ten times in different languages. It’s not a human being, but I guess since the number’s still owned by the same company I’ll allow it.

Publisher: Electronic Arts. Source: Centurion: Defender of Rome manual. Result: Private voicemail.

Publisher: Electronic Arts. Source: Ultima Collection manual, 1998. Result: “The person you are trying to reach is not accepting calls at this time.”

Publisher: Hasbro Interactive. Source: Worms Armageddon manual, 1999. Result: It’s a cruise ship scam! “Congratulations! You’ve won a complimentary two-night cruise! Your only responsibility is a nominal port fee of $59 per person…”

Publisher: Interplay. Source: Baldur’s Gate manual, 1998. Result: number disconnected.

Publisher: GT Interactive. Source: Heretic shareware tech support insert, 1994. Result: number not in service.

Publisher: GT Interactive. Source: Unreal manual, 1997. Result: nonworking number registered to Cytel, Inc.

Publisher: GT Interactive. Source: Unreal Tournament manual, 1999. Result: busy signal.

Developer: Looking Glass Studios. Source: Terra Nova: Strike Force Centauri manual, 1996. Result: private voicemail.

Developer: Paragon Software. Source: Dr. Doom’s Revenge manual, 1989. Result: number not in service.

Publisher: Nintendo of America. Source: Kirby’s Adventure manual, 1993. (Why this was in my PC box is anyone’s guess.)

• Result: An amiable human tech answers. I ask him how long his number has been in service. He puts me on hold so he can ask his supervisor. After a moment, he returns and says he intends to escalate this matter to his supervisor’s supervisor. He reassures me that he’s determined to “find the solution to my problem.” (Although he’s cheerful he speaks only in phone-tech generics.) He returns a couple minutes later and proudly announces that the number has been in service since the debut of the NES stateside in 1985. Holy crap.

Publisher: Microsoft. Source: Age of Empires manual, 1997. Result: number disconnected.

Developer: Bungie. Source: Myth: The Fallen Lords manual, 1997. Result: unknown voicemail.

Developer: Origin Systems. Source: Jane’s AH-64D Longbow manual, 1996. Result: number disconnected.

Developer: Access Software. Source: Links LS manual, 1996. Result: oddly soothing muzak.

Developer: SSI, Inc. Source: Gateway to the Savage Frontier manual, 1991. Result: number disconnected.

Developer: Maxis. Source: SimCity Classic manual, 1993. Result: private voicemail.

---

So Nintendo wins the contest: it’s been using the same tech support number since 1985. That just figures, doesn’t it? On a long enough timeline, Nintendo wins at everything.

Somewhere around here I’ve got another box-o-manuals of comparable size that I still can’t find. I checked the closet, under the bed, even beneath my big pile of unwearable winter clothing (the Tampa climate being what it is). If I ever do find it, expect a sequel post, or at the very least an addendum.

Download "On an Unknown Beach" from The Last Great Challenge in a Dull World by Peter Jefferies (1990)

I’m lucky to have a print copy of Amaranth Borsuk’s Tonal Saw, a long poem created by erasure from the pamphlet National Sunday Law.

But that print chapbook, which was printed in a small edition of only 100 copies, is now sold out.

So, I was pleased to find (for everyone else’s benefit) that Tonal Saw is available as a PDF from the press that published that print chapbook, The Song Cave. Here is is!

You can find other quality PDFs on The Song Cave’s site.

Tree fulla idiots

This horrible device plays Christmas songs through a speaker when you unfurl your toilet-paper. That is, it would if it worked. One angry customer wrote “It product is very bad. I don’t like is bad.” If you want to see what the target market for this product types like when they’re mad, there are six other reviews.

Read the newest instalment of “World of the Leather Space Man” on Hazlitt

a massive dump of incredible work, over 10,000 assets from the pioneering game  

Before the 20th century, there is little historical record of a link between Halloween and witchcraft. The relatively recent association appears to be American:

It is no surprise, perhaps, that part of the answer lies with the rise of modern marketing and branding. How does one dress up as a witch for Halloween, as many thousands will be doing this 31 October? Basically you stick a black pointy hat on your head. Depictions of witches with pointy hats began to appear in children’s books in eighteenth-century England, probably inspired by earlier black steeple hats worn in stereotypic depictions of seventeenth-century Puritans. By the end of the nineteenth century the pointy-hatted witch had become a widespread image in print. It was at this moment that Salem, Massachusetts, comes into the picture. It was there that a jeweller named Daniel Low began to produce souvenir spoons depicting a witch with a pointy hat and broom. Their success kick-started the transformation of Salem into the marketing creation ‘Witch City’, and the pointy-hatted witch was replicated on numerous ‘Witch City’ products.

At the same time as this witch image was proliferating in marketing and the mass media, the nature of American Halloween custom was changing. With its roots in Irish mischief night, American youths had traditionally marked Halloween by performing such malicious acts as greasing railway tracks, smashing windows, and overturning outdoor toilets. But from the 1950s onwards the sanitised American trick-or-treat and costume bonanza we know today was beginning to spread. The remarketing of Witch City into Halloween City by local entrepreneurs from the 1980s onwards was a significant element in this transformation. “It’s America’s biggest Halloween party and you’re invited!” one promotional site proclaims today. The now inseparable link between witchcraft and Halloween was forged.

Culminating in this amazing awful scene in The Worst Witch (which you can watch in full here):

Martin Schneider shivers at the classic Halloween hathos:

Tim Curry is always inescapably Tim Curry, and in this context that’s a positive boon—he may be the only element in this brief clip that’s even halfway up to snuff. Never have I seen so many superfluous and chintzy video effects deployed in such a short span of time—innumerable green-screen effects, several completely crazy swirl transitions, who knows what the hell else. It’s truly a phantasmagoria of 80s cheese.

(Image: “Hallowe’en precautions” postcard, c. 1910, via NYPL Digital Gallery)

When Firaxis re-imagined X-Com last year, they handled the game’s theme and characters gingerly. As much as Firaxis’ XCOM took dramatic liberties with under-the-hood mechanics, the story beats and familiar rogue’s gallery of aliens were all still there from the original game; from the Sectoids who look like they just walked off the set of an Unsolved Mysteries re-enactment, to the buffed-out Barry Bonds Mutons.

One alien in particular didn’t fare so well in the translation, however: the Chryssalid. The apex predators from the original X-Com, encounters with Chryssalids back in 1994 were cheek-moistening journeys into a world of sheer terror. As much as I loved Firaxis’ fresh take on XCOM, I was disappointed by the tame new Chryssalids, who only managed to be occasionally dangerous.

There’s a lot of flashy features and glitzy gameplay elements that got printed on the box for XCOM’s new Enemy Within expansion. But the best thing that the game does is make Chryssalids scary again. Really, really scary.

Ask any fan of the original X-Com about the game and you’ll very quickly find yourself in a conversation about Chryssalids, the black, vaguely insectoid monsters that you would find in densely-populated city maps where your X-Com troopers had dropped in to protect the innocent.

The Chryssalid was unlike most other X-Com adversaries in that it had no ranged attack. Instead of carrying a gun, the nimble creature roamed the map attacking civilians and soldiers with its claws. Taking a page from HR Giger’s Alien, anyone felled by a Chryssalid would transform into a zombie which, when killed, became a new Chryssalid. If not properly contained, a terror site map with ten aliens and ten civilians could become a map with twenty aliens very quickly.

I still recall my teenage encounters with Chryssalids with a twinge of horror. It wasn’t so much the brain-melting tactical puzzle presented by taking on Chryssalids as it was the emotional trauma that followed a battle with them. Were you really attached to Sergeant Jonlan? Well now he’s a zombie that you’ll have to kill with your own hands. And then once more for good measure after a new hideous space abomination pops out of his corpse like a toothy, slimy jack-in-the-box. Chryssalids took X-Com’s defining feature — your growing affection for your veteran soldiers — and turned it against you.

My default operational plan that my fourteen-year-old self concocted for Chryssalid terror sites was a scorched earth tactic that Stalin would appreciate. At the first hint of the presence those monstrosities in a city, I would order the murder of everything in it on two legs. Sorry civilians — you might be the taxpayers that are funding X-Com, but you’re also potential Chryssalids. That’s why we’re sterilising your city with incendiary ammunition. Thanks for the tax dollars, though.

The first time my XCOM squad and I encountered one of Firaxis’ new look Chryssalids, it served up an unusual cocktail of dread and nostalgia. The beasts had received a substantial makeover in the new game, sporting garish purple skin and looking more gangly and spidery and less (to the relief of 2K’s lawyers, no doubt) like the movie Aliens.

But while they looked the part of fiendish man-eaters from another planet, they failed to live up to the fearsome reputation of their predecessors. The new Chryssalids were still fast, and still retained that awful zombifying modus operandi, but their zombies didn’t give birth to new Chryssalids, and the monsters themselves didn’t seem half as clever as the 1994 model. Because XCOM’s new enemy-spawning mechanics prevented them from skulking around the map pouncing on unsuspecting civilians, Chryssalids now would just scurry right up to XCOM troopers in selfless banzai charges. Once you learned to pull your squad back behind overlapping fields of overwatch, the once-fearsome Chryssalids could be reduced to mush, even with early-game weapons. Clearly, it was time to review the Chryssalids’ place in the Monster Hall of Fame.

The new XCOM Enemy Within expansion pack adds a raft of new features to the game, but it also gives us the Chryssalids we deserve. The AI for Chryssalids has been tweaked rather dramatically and now the monsters do a lot more lurking in the shadows and a lot less frontal assaulting.

Your squad of Earth’s finest defenders has just charged through the front door (and windows) of a bank in Acapulco, and the Chryssalids within don’t eagerly charge onto your spear as XCOM taught you they would. No, the Enemy Within Chryssalids go high-tailing out the back door, in search of less well-armed prey. Firaxis had sent them to some nightmarish school of infantry and suddenly the beasts were setting ambushes.

And this is the best bit. As with many of the new features in EW (like the Meld resource hidden around the map), the new-style Chryssalid is designed to make you play more aggressively. No more hiding behind your reaction fire testudo, Commander — you’re going to have to chase those Chryssalids down that blind alley, lest they ram their eggs down the gullets of more Mexican civilians. Fighting Chryssalids means breaking all of the carefully wrought rules that have kept your squad alive so far in this game, and if you get it wrong they will punish you for it. Set loose in the many new urban spaces of Enemy Within, they’re almost as dangerous as their legendary predecessors from 1994. Firaxis seem to know just how good version 2.0 of the Chryssalid is: there’s an entire council mission built around them and the horrifying, unnerving thing that they’ve done to a Canadian fishing village. I won’t spoil it in case you haven’t discovered it yet.

The Chryssalids of Enemy Within are just awful in a way that is truly worthy of their name. Maybe “improved Chryssalid AI” isn’t a feature worthy of sticking up on the box next to “new faction to fight” and “new resource to collect”, but it’s the feature that warms this old X-Com fan’s heart the most.

Amidst crime, cults, sex, and talk shows, a television actor attempts one last job.

- NSFW - READ PART ONE – NEWEST UPDATE -

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Prominence is a sci-fi mystery adventure game that evokes through every detail of its design some of my favorite space settings: 2001: A Space Odyssey, Star Trek TNG, System Shock 2, and the imagined starships of countless novels. Its precision lines, density of machinery, and eerie placidity speak to me in ways hard to delineate. It doesn’t have a release date yet–the devs are shooting for early 2014–but you can vote for it on Steam Greenlight as I just did.

Prominence’s first-person perspective, click-to-move mechanics and multiple independent character arcs all remind me of The Last Express, one of the greatest adventure games, and one that makes you wonder why it hasn’t ever been imitated. Probably because it didn’t sell very well. If only we could imitate its other aspects, while somehow appealing to a broader market. Wait, I’ve got it! We’ll put it in outer space.

The video below is a must-watch if you’re a fan of the adventure genre, the sci-fi genre, or genres in general.

I feel newly vulnerable. This video has made me painfully aware how subject I am to the blind caprices of fate. Either the game will be good, and life will be happy; or it will disappoint, and I’ll die pining for the alternate universe that might have been.

among other problems, it favors Google+ trolls over actual fans; some lessons from Hank Green  

We often take for granted these days that successful indie games will receive lots of post-release content; think of Minecraft, Terraria, Dungeons of Dredmor and countless others. Sadly FTL, my favorite of the roguelike-likes, has languished comparatively unimproved–which wouldn’t be so bad, except the game just bristles with expansion possibilities, everything from new species, ships, and weapons, to new text encounters. For lovers of roguelikes this goes beyond unrequited love: it’s a case of blueballs that spans the galaxy itself.

That’s all about to change for the better. Today Matthew Davis and Justin Ma announced the game’s first truly major update. When FTL: Advanced Edition arrives early next year, it’ll deliver new ship systems, weapons, enemies, and interface improvements. Chris Avellone, lead writer for Planescape: Torment and most of the other best-written games in history, is contributing his unique talents to the text events. And best of all, the update is completely free.

Free, that is, unless you want to play on the iPad. Oh, so I guess I should mention: FTL for the iPad is officially a thing.

I wouldn’t recommend watching the trailer below the jump unless you’re prepared to sacrifice the rest of the day. I’m launching Steam as I type this…

Achewood strip for Friday, November 8, 2013

When we ran into Torico near LaForet Harajuku, it was no surprise that she was in a hurry. She’s the designer of the fashion brand Meewee Dinkee (formed by the Japanese art group Maywa Denki). The brand just kicked off its debut exhibition at the Wall boutique inside of LaForet. Luckily for us, Torico was kind enough to stop for a few quick street snaps!

Torico is wearing an outfit that features a leopard coat from D&G with a Meewee Dinkee dress, graphic tights, and Jeffrey Campbell wooden platforms. Accessories – most of which came from Meewee Dinkee – include several necklaces and bracelets as well as a pretty birdcage veil. Her pink quilted purse is by Chanel and her nail art – which is partially inspired by Meewee Dinkee – is also exceptional.

Torico has her own personal Twitter. If you want to check out Meewee Dinkee’s new collection, the brand’s popup shop will be at LaForet through November 17, 2013. You can also see some of the brand’s pieces on the Wall Harajuku blog.

Click on any photo to enlarge it.

Another week, another huge, unheralded publisher sale from GOG. Considered cumulatively, the last few GOG publisher sales are as good as even the biggest Steam sale. This time around the entire classic Activision catalog is 60% off. Here are a few standouts:

• Interstate ’76, the funk-infused car combat game with surprisingly deep simulation elements, is just $2.39. I-76 is based on the old Mechwarrior 2 engine, and like that game it simulates damage to the cars’ various components. You can even salvage scrap from the battlefield after each mission. As good a game as it is, though, there’s an important caveat. Many of the user reviews mention uncharacteristic technical problems with GOG’s version of the game, and the GOG forum is full of tips that seem to work for some but not others. If you’re as fond of this title as I am, you may find it worth the possible configuration headaches.

• The classic Impressions historical city-building games Caesar 3, Pharaoh and Zeus are all on sale. Caesar 3 is $2.39, while the latter two are $3.99 apiece. I introduced CJ to these games recently–she refers to the subsequent period as her “lost month,” one of those profound binges when you’re continually dizzy with thoughts of the game. Few games are as charming, as well realized and compelling as these.

• Arcanum: Of Steamworks & Magick Obscura is an expansive 2001 steampunk RPG made by some of the same people responsible for Fallout. If you’re willing to learn its systems and see past its slightly clunky interface (I hear wearing a monocle helps establish the mood), it ought to provide you with dozens of hours of gameplay. $2.39 is a pretty good price for all that.

GOG’s weekend promo lasts until Monday evening. There are a ton more classic games involved in the sale, so be sure to have a look.

Steam’s running some pretty good deals of its own this weekend. FTL is the best take on the roguelike genre I’ve played in years, and if somehow you don’t already own it it’s only $5.

The entire Serious Sam collection is on sale, too. At $14.24 that’s an 85% discount from the normal price. Not bad for some of the few modern games to really nail that chaotic old-school shooter feeling. Each game in the collection is also available individually at the same discount.

Finally, here’s a surefire way to tell if someone’s an out-and-out sophist: if they advise against snagging Portal 2 for just $4.99.

Phil Scuderi
Weekend Price Drops: Interstate ’76, FTL, Portal 2 and more
Red Door Blue Key
Red Door Blue Key -

A couple of months ago I spoke with Coldrice (born Jon King) about Interstellaria, a 2D space exploration game he’s building for iPad, Android and desktops. “I want the feeling of commanding a ship – or of exploring space,” Coldrice told me, a sensation he felt was lacking in mobile games. Now Coldrice is looking for a little help to make that happen — and I do mean little. His new Interstellaria Kickstarter is after a very achievable $15,000.

Interstellaria is a lot further along today. Coldrice plans to start a semi-public alpha in January, and much of the open-galaxy exploration (with planets you can visit), crew management, ship upgrading, and other key systems are already in place. He’s brought an accomplished chiptune composer and an additional artist on board to help share the load.

There’s something about this game concept that just clicks for me — I backed this one myself, the minute it went live. Watch the pitch video after the jump and if you are similarly moved, the Kickstarter’s right over here.

In our conversation, Coldrice talked up the influence that Starflight had on him — just look at the title screen for Interstellaria and you can see it for yourself.

Let me cut to the chase: Mumford and Sons is fucking awful. The question is how awful. We are dealing with a level of lyrical incompetence approaching absolute zero, a place where normal measures cease to function. I’ll admit their songs are catchy but that catchiness not only is separate from the quality of their […]

Meet Kumi, a 22-year-old student with a braided two-tone hairstyle and all-black fashion who caught our eye on the street in Harajuku.

Kumi is wearing a Zara shirt dress with Belly Button (by Tokyo Bopper) cross strap rocking horse shoes. Her bag is from ANAP, and her simple chain necklace is from Spinns.

Click on any photo to enlarge it.

This is Yuka, a hair & makeup artist who works with the poppy punky Japanese band HENNYO. When we met her in Harajuku (she was walking with HENNYO at the time), Yuka told us that she’s active on Twitter.

Yuka is wearing an oversized blue dress, which was picked up resale. She paired it with a white backpack from Muji, her favorite shop. She is also wearing a lizard necklace, silver earrings, white eye make-up and colored contacts, as well as white ballet flats.

Yuka told us that her favorite music is created by her friends, the Hennyo Girls. She also likes Ushirono Necozawa.

Click on any photo to enlarge it.