PSO the Return

You know I mildly dislike Facebook (see here) but for once it has proved worthwhile. Via it I've managed to hook up with my old PSOlife forumites and we're planning to get our GameCubes back online and playing.

Should be good!

Wall-crawling car

Very pretty eh?

This RC car uses a fan to suction on to walls or the ceiling and can then drive along them quite happily. Just be sure to be there when the batteries are running out...

Amazon Japan has it priced at 3950yen (MRP 4725yen) and slated for an October 2008 release.

Via Ota-suke

42 days!

...to the new incarnation of Phantasy Star comes out on the PSP!
I'll be placing my order tomorrow...

(spent today on Mugen no Frontier again btw)

Mugen no Frontier stole my day off

Well what can I say? I was starting to get into it and BAM! I'm addicted. Even managed to kill the battery in my DS lite today and it's only just finished charging...back to it in a min!

Rune Factory 2 update

I was just reading some past posts and realised that I hadn't actually updated my current play-status on RF2.

Well, I go married a few days ago. My bride is Mana, the daughter of Douglas, the guy who owns the shop and who lent me the farm.

I'm not exactly new to the Harvest Moon games, but I've never really had time to play them to infinity. However, I'm kind of surprised that I managed to get married on the 19th day of Summer in the first year of my farming life. But there you go.

Otaku

This is a response to this thread on the Gamplay.co.uk forum, as the bloody forum won't let me post it for some reason:

The article on Wikipedia explains it well.

otaku = house
Also used as an old pronoun similar to "you" (some characters in Animal Crossing use it)

Japanese otaku-subculture = Single man, works too much, can't get a girlfriend so obsesses over a certain (or many) anime character/series. These are the people who are more likely to play adult computer games.
Because of the wide appeal of video games, I believe it's only recently that the word has become associated with video games and technology due to the presence of all of these things in Akihabara - the place where many people say otaku go because that's what TV told them and so it became true. Otaku are still looked down on in Japan, not that they would say that to their faces though.

Otaku in the rest of the world = technogeek

I did once briefly consider explaining this to Kotaku when I was trying to get a job there, but I decided they'd never listen to me.

On a language note, it's interesting that this word has been slightly corrupted as there are many many more examples in Japanese where an English word has lost it's original meaning and now means something completely different.