Gasp!! Out of the House!!

I made it out of the house on Sunday and Monday! Sunday I wanted to check out Shimokitazawa because my group in Anthropology is doing a video about it. I figure that I should get my bearings and at the very least see what was there. Vaso decided to come along on my journey. We walked around talking and checking out all the little allyways filled with stores. I was on a mission to buy an Igo board and some sandals. I specifically wanted sandals because it is getting close to summer. Oddly enough, we stopped by a kimono store and I ended up buying some cheap traditional sandals. They are pretty sweet. I also wanted to get a belt for my yukata, but they cost way more than the sandals did. Come on! It is a long piece of cloth!

We wandered around and ended up at an okonomiyaki place that had a huge line in front of it. It had to be good right? We got in line and waited almost 40 minutes before entering the building. The waitress took our order while we were still standing in line, but we still had to wait another 10 minutes for them to cook our "all mix" okonomiyaki. It was really cool because everyone was sitting in a bar-like setting around a giant hot frying pan. The cooks made all of the food in front of everybody. I must say that our okonomiyaki was the best I have tasted outside of Osaka. It was more like Hiroshima okonomiyaki because it had soba in the middle.

Later on, we went to Shinjuku in search of an Igo board. I had previously seen one at the Tokyu Hands in Takeshimaya, so that was our first stop. After wandering the 13 floor department store for about an hour, we finally found the board game section. To my dissapointment, the go boards that they had were really cheap with plastic stones. Needless to say I did not buy one. I emailed a couple friends from my club and they told me to ask the owner of the go place next time I go. Good idea. Anyway, Vaso and I bought some candy then decided to go home. It was too dark to go to Yoyogi park and we wanted to get home for dinner.

Monday was a little more interesting. I woke up early and started on my laundry. Soon after I got an email from Sheung Sheung saying that her plans had been cancelled and she was free to hang out with me. The only catch is that she is lazy and would not be out of the house until 2pm. Fine with me.

I spent the morning researching rom translation. Over the summer I tried my hand at some simple text translation of the GBA game Mother 3. It was going fairly well as I had the bulk of the pause and battle menu translated. Then I ran into the problem of actually inserting other code into the game. There is this thing called Variable Width Text (VWF) which English uses and Japanese doesn't. It basically means that all Japanese characters fit into a 16x16 pixel box, while in English the characters will be closer or further apart depending on how big the character is. For instance, typing 3 "i"s will take up less space than typing 3 "o"s. This poses the problem that English text looks terrible when using the Japanese system. Anywho, I never got around to learning how to program and gave up on the project. I was also pressed for time preparing to come to Japan.

So this time around I have started the translation of a game called Jump Ultimate Stars for the DS. At the moment no DS translation has been finished. Also, I wanted to choose a game that nobody else has started on (the Mother 3 translation is well underway.) I spent all morning on Monday figuring out where the text is stored and the control codes to access them. This will pose a slightly bigger problem than my previous attempt because the game uses kanji. Not only is there the 52 roman alphabet, the 100 katakana and hiragana, but also the 2000+ kanji. There may not be that many actually used in the game, but after looking at the code they are all there. Hopefully I will be able to develop a pattern as to automatically fill in all the kanji instead of me finding the code for each one.

Anyhow, I made some good progress and this morning got to the point where I could insert my own text. Here is a screenshot of the first working English text insertion:



As you can see, each English letter is taking up a "block" of space making it look bad and not allowing very long sentences. My current goal is to get all of the text from the game dumped into a nice little text file for easy translation. Once that is done, I will worry about figuring out all the VWF stuff. This stuff is fun I swear!!!

Back to Monday ^_^

I met up with Sheung Sheung at 3pm in Harajuku only to find out that the Snoopy store is no longer there! It has been replaced by a clothes store instead!! Lame. We did not spend any time in Harajuku, but instead walked through Yoyogi Park and Meiji Jingu. It was nice and peaceful. After that we decided to walk to Shinjuku as Sheung Sheung wanted to buy a camera. Her old one is broken apparently. We walked all the way to the Yodobashi Camera and she spent the next hour browsing the different models of cameras, finally decided on a brand that I had never heard of before. I like my Cannon ultra portable cameras!

Next up was dinner. I wanted to go to Shin-Okubo to check out the Korean restaurants so we started walking. The Korean food was all really expensive, running from 1500 - 2000 yen a meal!!! That being out of both of our price ranges, we hit up a local Chinese place instead for some Gyoza and Noodles. Finally, we figured that since it was close, we might as well just walk to Takadanobaba as well. We stopped by the Mister Donut for desert and headed towards the station. We decided to play billiards along the way and I knew of a couple places right near the station. We chose a random one and got right in. Sheung Sheung is fairly good at pool. She beat me the first two games and I won the second two. At this our hour was up so we decided to leave it as a tie and head home. For being a student, we both got discounts, but because Sheung Sheung is a girl, she got an extra discount! Lame! I can pass as a girl right?