Don't ask what the "D" stands for

Me, Megan, and Alex went into Osaka yesterday (it's basically the equivalent of going into 'the city' for somebody who lives in NY but not in NYC). Osaka is gigantic - it's the second largest city in Japan - but the buildings weren't quite as imposing for me, a New Yorker, who has been to NYC many times. Megan and Alex were pretty awe-struck, however. What made my jaw gape was yet to come.

Walking aimlessly, we wandered into what we called a "tunnel-mall". The best way to explain this is thus: picture a subway entrance. Now picture, if you will, that once you reach the bottom of this entrance, it opens up into an underground shopping mall, where the second-third floor of the buildings in this underground road/mall reach ground level, then continue upwards into 7-8 floor buildings. Each floor of every building is another restaurant/arcade/pachinkothing/hotel/bar/spa/store. Thus, in just one block, you might pass about a hundred different stores.

We walked for about three blocks and spent about 8 hours in this one tunnel-mall. They're all over the place, too. There are some 'tunnel-malls' that span almost the entire city.

We went arcade-hopping for a little while, since Megan and Alex are as geeky as I am, and the amount of amazing things we witnessed was incredible. There are arcade games in Japan that cannot even be fathomed by Americans. You know an arcade game is going to be intense when you notice it has its own fire extinguishers. There are a whole slew of Gundam games, and if you're not familiar with the Gundam series or can tell the differences and nuisances between how each game plays, you'd think there was an entire room with only one game in it. There's Half-Life 2: Survivor, which is essentially an arcade game that brings you through every major part of the PC game Half-Life 2, except with an almost RPG-esque class-based online multiplayer deathmatch tacked on as well. The game plays with a two joysticks in order to emulate the PC-style of play, instead of a light-gun like most shooter arcade games. Speaking of light guns...

As we walked into our third arcade, me and Megan spotted, huddled in the corner, the best arcade game we've ever seen. Silent Hill: The Arcade Game. Immediately we looked at each other with glee, hugged, and ran inside, and threw 100 yen coins into the machine without restraint. The sounds, music, and locations were all taken directly from previous Silent Hill games, and coupled with really good speakers and some sort of noise cancellation device, we were able to hear almost everything that was going on in the game despite the loud arcade around us. This was the only light gun shooter to truly SCARE the living crap out of me, and we loved it. Whenever Pyramid Head showed up as a recurring boss, the three of us were screaming in terror that could be heard, likely, throughout the entire arcade: a testament to how amazing Konami's horror franchise is.

Me and Megan have become addicted to a Japanese arcade game called "Quest of D". Like a surprising amount of Japanese arcade games (some kind of new phenomenon), Quest of D utilizes collectible trading cards. There are a lot of these kinds of arcade games in Japan, where you collect cards that have creatures, items, skills, troops, whatever the game uses, and the game itself will READ these cards, either by placing them on a computerized playing table, or by placing them inside the machine itself. Every time you play the game, you get a booster pack with one or more cards inside... Making the game incredibly addicting. I imagine it'd be even better if me and Megan could converse with the Japanese people around us to trade cards, but at least we have each other to trade with for now. When we started playing, however, a very nice Japanese man (yes, man, he must have been in his twenties) who had hundreds of cards was kind enough to show us how to play, since the tutorial was in Japanese. He even GAVE us as presents (we were able to converse despite our meager language skills) holographic foil rare cards that he apparently didn't need. I soon learned there is a sort of underground arcade 'society' here that by no means exists in America. Grown men and teenagers alike spending coin after well-earned coin on a collectible-arcade-card-game doesn't happen in America (though if you take the word arcade out of that sentence, it's a different story).

Even games that DON'T utilize cards have some kind of ID card associated with it, that you can purchase for a cheap price, and it takes a record of all of your stats, ranking, etc. The Virtua Fighter 5 consoles here are ripe with these ID cards - the more wins you accumulate, the more you can customize your characters by bringing this ID card to a little terminal and spending a sort of 'VF credit'. This sort of thing just doesn't EXIST in America.

We also, in the height of geekdom, visited a shop that had rows and rows of Manga, Doujinshi (amateur manga, basically), video games, and DVDs. The inside of this shop seemed to be modeled after the inside of a Dragon's mouth (as the entrance), the walls being made of a plastic-like material that looked sort of like a cave at first glance.

In Japan, while it is not incredibly common to see, there are no laws against showing bare breasts in advertisements for pornography, such as posters seen outside of 18+ DVD stores. Interesting tidbit.

We ate dinner and headed back on the train towards Hirakata, feeling quite fulfilled. Maybe my next post will be less geeky. This one sort of HAD to happen.