I've been chipping away at Final Fantasy XII over the past 10 days or so. And, to my surprise, I'm actually getting into it. I find myself looking forward to the little theme song that plays when the game first loads up. Doot, doot. Doot, doot. Doot, doot, etc.

One thing I've been having to learn how to deal with is the inherent ambiguity of the genre. I can't stand ambiguity. I need the world, and my books, and my movies, and my games--especially my games--to make perfect sense. (Music, less so.) I have a friend in Boston who made a baby about a year ago, and since his gaming time is severely limited now, he refuses to play anything but Rock Band. His reasoning: There is absolutely nothing about Rock Band that is ambiguous.

But FF XII throws a bunch of stuff at me--armlets and wolf pelts and fancy leather wear and various types of stones--and basically says, "Here. You figure out what to do with all of this shit."

Each time I collected something new for my inventory, a little bit more panic accrued in my panic tank.

And, in the vernacular of Gus Mastrapa, I had the unnerving, futile feeling that I was doing it wrong.

So I went on a real world question over the weekend, to Brooklyn, to seek the counsel of Old Man John Teti. (I also went out there to see the new cats, and his new apartment, and his lovely wife, AND his mom, who was in town for the weekend. But also to seek counsel regarding FF XII.)

While his wife and mom were busy doing other stuff, Teti and I had a private moment. I told him that I was going out into this desert area, and there were some hyenas, and I killed them, and some annoying bunny things (killed them), and some strange bipedal owl-like creatures (killed them; but sometimes they killed me). Penelo and I would kill as many of these things as we could, collect our XP, and then we'd limp back to the nearest Save Stone, and rejuvenate our health. Then, it was back to the desert to basically do the same thing. Then, some werewolves killed me and Penelo, and I remembered that an NPC had previously told me to STAY AWAY FROM THE WEREWOLVES, but I didn't heed said advice.

After an hour or so of this, as I explained to Teti, I began to wonder: Am I doing it wrong?

And this bit of anxiety gave rise to other bits of anxiety. Did I have the right equipment, you know, equipped? Was I on some advanced quest that I shouldn't even be on? Should I travel to the far side of the map and look for the zebra-unicorn thing that w1ndstorm suggested I look for?

Teti said: "You're fine."

Then he explained that one of the great pleasures of the game, and the FF series in general, comes from figuring out how to play the game. "Nothing is ever explained," he said. "Just stay with it, and you'll figure it out. No matter what you're doing, you're not doing it wrong."

In other words: the answers will reveal themselves eventually.

Later that night, back in Queens, I purchased a couple of +15 Broadswords for Penelo and myself. "We've really earned it," I reasoned. "Look at all the Hyena Bs and Hyena Cs we've slaughtered!" But when I went to equip them, the game had the Broadswords grayed out in my inventory. I cursed a blue streak.

Then, just as Teti has promised, the answer revealed itself to me. 

Duh, I thought. I don't have the proper LICENSE to wield these swords.

Back into the license menu I went. Proper licenses were acquired for both of us. And the two of us went back into the desert, leaving a trail of perpetually vanishing Hyena corpses behind us. My AT Rating (Ambiguity Tolerance): +2. 

I'm back in New York for the first time in a couple months. Back in my old bed, back in my old desk chair, back in my neighborhood of many years.

It's strange being here. I find myself looking at my old things like an anthropologist, wondering: Who this person was who lived here? What were his values? How did he live? Did he enjoy his life at all?

Clearly this person wasn't terribly organized (note: laundry discovered in closet that has been sitting there for several months). He seemed to enjoy pornography and dry roasted peanuts and string cheese. The kitchen drawers are stuffed with old soy sauce packets and chopsticks; he must have had at least seven thousand dollars worth of Chinese food delivered over the years.

And clearly this person played a lot of games. Bad games, mostly.

I am astonished, and more than a little embarrassed, by the mass quantities of terrible games I'm still harboring.

True Crime: Streets of LA (Xbox). The Matrix: Path of Neo (Xbox). Driver: Parallel Lines (Xbox). MVP Baseball '05 (Xbox), a series that has been defunct for several years now. Something called Spartan: Total Warrior (Xbox). Gladiator: Sword of Vengeance (Xbox). True Crime: Streets of NY (Xbox). That's just a swatch of the larger fabric, too.

Added together, the total value of these games is probably -$6.04.

You cannot give these games away. Literally. And I feel strange putting them in the garbage. Somebody, somewhere worked on these games. (I've been to dev offices; I've seen how hard these people work. They bust ass.) Somebody put in long hours. Somebody--at least one member of the dev team--put a little bit of heart and maybe even a bit of soul into these virtual worlds. Whenever I stare at my shelves of bad games, I inevitably think, Well, maybe some day I'll get around to finishing Black, or 007 Everything Or Nothing, or Destroy All Humans. Maybe I'll take a good, hard look at those games, and I'll finally find something to love about them, something to appreciate.

And thus: Here they sit, lost in a kind of collector's limbo.

I've made it my mission to cull the stacks this week. To thin the herd. Anything that's even marginal has got to go. I'm traveling light from now on. It's Jones 2.0. No! It's Jones 2.1!

I'll keep you posted on Project What To Keep What To Toss 2009 this week.

Send me strength, oh mighty gods of gaming.

Meanwhile, here's a question (and be honest here): What's the most embarrassing bit of gaming effluvia you are harboring in your collection?

Let's hear it.

Yesterday we went to an afternoon baseball game at the Tokyo Dome. Teti got us tickets through some shifty journalist named Wayne who I made the mistake of calling "Wade," and once I realized how irritated Teti was by my mistake, I decided to go ahead and refer to the guy as "Wade" for the rest of the day. Getting Teti all red-assed about something is SO FUN. 

We watched the Yomiuri Giants beat the Chunichi Dragons 5 to 3 in the quickest nine innings of baseball I have ever seen.

More importantly, whenever the game got boring, we could watch the cute vending girls who were dressed in brightly colored shorts climb the Dome's vertigo-inducing incline with LITTLE KEGS OF BEER strapped to their backs.

It's settled: I now know what I want my future wife to wear on our wedding night. 

JONES FANTASY #004: My wife, who will bear more than a passing resemblance to Cheryl Tiegs, will say, "Let me slip into somethng more comfortable." And she would disappear into the bathroom of our expensive hotel room. The bed would be covered with rose petals VOTED MOST ROMANTIC GESTURE EVER 2008 AND 2009. I would put some Bryan Adams songs on the radio.

And then a few minutes later, the door would open and I would see this:

Yesterday Teti and I decide to combat our hangovers from John Riccardi's Eight-Four party Tuesday night (WE MET SUDA-51; SUCK ON THAT MASTRAPA HA HA HA HA HA!!!) by having curry.

We take two seats at the counter. Teti speaks Japanese, so he does the ordering for us. My way of ordering is to point at the photograph of an item on a menu, then start praying very hard that whatever it is is somewhat delicious.

As he's ordering curry for us, telling the counter girl in Japanese what we want, he stops and looks at me and says, "She wants to know how much rice we want."

Jones (hungover): "I want a lot of rice."

Teti: (Something in Japanese to counter-girl.)

Counter-girl: (Something in Japanese to Teti.)

Teti: (Something more in Japanese to counter-girl.)

Once she's gone, I ask him what that exchange was all about. "When I told her how much rice we wanted, she said, 'Wow, that's a lot of rice.' I told her to bring it to us anyway." We immediately begin making jokes about this moment (and we will continue to make jokes about it for the rest of the day), reenacting this exchange: Girl voice: Well, that's a lot of rice. Us: JUST BRING IT TO ME, WOMAN. DON'T TELL ME HOW MUCH RICE IS "TOO MUCH." YOU HAVE NO IDEA WHAT INCREDIBLE RICE-CONSUMING SKILLS WE POSSESS. US: [Laughter]

A few minutes later two dishes the size of Russell Crow's shield in Gladiator emerge from the kitchen.

"Oh no," Teti says. "She was right. This certainly is a lot of rice." We both start to work at our plates of curry and million pounds of rice. A few minutes later:

Teti: I'm so full already that I'm ready to burst. But I can't leave all this rice here. I won't give her the satisfaction! I won't!

Jones: Me either!

We eat on. And on.

We both continue to eat well past the point of any of this being remotely pleasurable. We both do a decent job of consuming our giant rice-curry piles; Bishibashi champion Teti does slightly better than I do (winner: Teti).

Other running joke for rest of the day that makes us both laugh every time even after the hundredth time of repeating it: That as soon as we leave the curry shop, they post a sign in the front window that says CLOSED - SORRY NO RICE. 

Teti is staying on the 22nd floor and I am on the 20th floor, but our Shinjuku Prince hotel rooms face the same general Easterly direction.

We were IMing yesterday morning when suddenly Teti sent me this mesage:

John Teti: WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT ROTATING YELLOW DEMON ON THE BUILDING DOWN THERE

Bleary-eyed, I went to the window and began scanning the Tokyo rooftops, looking for anything that was rotating and/or yellow and/or evocative of a demon.

I didn't see anything, so I went back to IM.

Jones: Where? I don't see anything.

John Teti: ABOUT SIX BUILDINGS TO THE LEFT OF THE PACHINKO PARLOR.

I go back to the window, locate the pachinko parlor, then began counting buildings. One. Two. Three...

And there it was: A ROTATING YELLOW DEMON.

Jones: I found it! I am laughing so hard. How in the world have we been looking out at these rooftops for three days and not seen it before this?

John Teti: I DON'T KNOW

Now, whenever I go to the window, despite the one million things that my eye might find interesting--the Tokyo skyline is literally endless--I always wind up staring at the ROTATING YELLOW DEMON.

It was the last thing I saw last night before going to bed. I could see it down there, still turning in the darkness. And it was the first thing I saw this morning.

I can't stop looking at it now. Even as I type this, it's out there, turning and turning....

I made a little video of it with my camera. The view is slightly obscured because I am two floors below Teti. (But his floor is a SMOKING OK floor.) Teti layered in some ROTATING YELLOW DEMON WATCHING chiptunes music.

Here are two pictures that Teti took of it.

And here's my video. The camera shakes near the end because I cracked up twice while filming this.

Last night Teti and I ate massive bowls of ramen in less than five minutes--the proper way to eat ramen apparently is fast--and then we walked off our ramen farts by taking a stroll around Shinjuku.

Shinjuku is rife with multi-storied arcades that appear to be open 24-7 and encourage cigarette smoking. Teti and I explored a few arcades, but we didn't really feel like any of the games we saw were calling out to us, until Teti--so he says--saw a game that featured some sort of toilet scene in it. The game was called BishiBashi. "Look, a toilet game!" he said.

I looked but I didn't see any toilets. "Right, suuuuure there were toilets," I said, folding my arms, playing the skeptic. How I love playing the skeptic. We both stood there watching the "attract" mode screen roll for the machine. "Wait, the toilets are coming," Teti said. "Just wait."

A few minutes passed. Still, no toilets.

Finally, Teti put 100 yen into the machine, and we started to play.

Gameplay consisted of pounding on three buttons as fast as possible to win some obscure contest. One of the mini-games consisted of folding origami. Another one consisted of taking photographs of a sexy lady. And still another one consisted of catching flying food on a skewer.

If you lost, a large heavy pan would drop on your avatar's head and one tiny white-gloved hand would--poof!--disappear at the bottom of the screen. When you were out of white-gloved hands, the game was over.

Teti won most of the games, I admit. Man, you should see him pound those buttons! He made a big racket which made some of the other arcade-goers stop and pay attention to us and blow cigarette smoke at us.

After it was over, I decided to dig Teti one last time. "You're telling me there was a toilet game in there?" I said. "You swear it?"

"Yes, I swear I saw a toilet game in there," he said. "I swear."

And I do believe him. Why would he make up something about a toilet game? Maybe today we'll go back and see the toilet game. It's Monday here, and we're in our hotel rooms following the Sunday football games via the Net.

Ah, Tokyo.

While waiting for Teti to arrive, I had a day to occupy by myself here in Shinjuku. I decided to sleep, eat, drink lots of water, read, monkey with my computer, play some GeoDefense Swarm on my iPhone, and generally attempt to recover from the 10 cruel and unusual hours I spent yesterday crunched and cramped into that coach seat on my JAL flight from Vancouver to Narita.

I'm single, as the entire world knows by now. Without a wife, S.O., or girlfriend, I have no one to answer to these days (except my two cats: The Chief and Bee). I can do what I want and not have to fuss about any messy guilt or hurt feelings on the far side of it. I believe it's a universal law that if you're single, and your hotel room telephone has a MASSAGE button on it, one must press said button and see what happens.

So I pressed it. Ring. Riiiiinnnng.

A nice-sounding Japanese girl answered on the other end. Her English was terrible, but she understood what I was asking for: I wanted a one hour massage.

I've had my share of massages in my day, so I know how they usually work. I wrapped one of my hotel room's postage-stamp sized towels around my waist, then put on the hotel's complimentary paper-thin robe that made my skin immediately start to itch. This felt like an appropriate outfit for an in-room massage. I also cued up Leonard Cohen at a very low volume on my MacBook, as I imagine the silence during a massage would be oppressive.

I waited.

I really don't like massages all that much. What I do like--TMI ahead, RED ALERT--is having my back scratched for a little while. That's it. I'm telling you, scratch my back just once, ladies, and do a decent enough job of it, and I'll follow you around and do your bidding for the rest of my days. It's that simple.

While waiting for massage person to arrive, I naturally tried to calculate the sleaze factor involved here. According to the little card in my room, massages begin daily at noon; and the last massage is at 3:00 a.m. Who offers massages until 3 a.m.? That did seem a bit sleazy to me. I sat in my room, nervously looking at the clock (my massage therapist was due at 1 p.m.) and pacing in my robe. I thought, Maybe she will be a cute Japanese girl. She would scratch my back with her long finger nails and say things to me that I couldn't understand--I love the sound of Japanese being spoken, even though I don't understand a word of it--and maybe she would like me a little, and I would like her, and she wouldn't steal any of my valuables (I had put my PSP and my new camera in the in-room safe, just in case) and she would give me a chaste kiss at the end of my back-scratch/massage, and later on I would meet her out for some udon and sake.

I have a very active imagination.

One o'clock, the doorbell rings (all hotel rooms in Tokyo have doorbells, FYI). I open the door to find a 4-foot-tall 50-year-old homunculous of a woman wearing a double-breasted white lab coat thing that makes her appear as if she'd only seconds earlier powered down a bunsen burner.

The woman speaks no English. None. I start to remove my robe. She panics. She blushes and turns away. She clearly wants me to keep my robe on. OK, OK, I get it. Suddenly my Leonard Cohen tracks playing in the background sound sleazy and suggestive.

Understatement of the day: This is not going well.

I'm nervous. The woman is nervous. She motions for me to lie down on the bed on my side. I try to relax, try to breath. She is poking at me, hurrying from limb to limb, working quickly. It feels like squirrells are crawling over me. In seven minutes, she is basically done with the entire massage.

I imagine this is what it would probably be like to get a massage from my Accountant: rushed and mechanical and cold and somewhat resentful.

With 53 minutes remaining of our time together, she proceeds to repeat what she has already done a second time. And when she is done with that, she repeats it again a third time. I try to breath through it all--inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale--wondering if I should go ahead and make her leave. But then parts of the seven-minute routine are actually kind of therapeutic, so I let her continue. 

She then decides that she wants me to do something different, but because of the language barrier, she has no choice but to act out what she wants. She lies down next to me in my tiny hotel room bed, stomach down, head on pillow. I notice that she has her shoes off at this point. She is wearing black socks. This is awkward. I make an "Ah-ha!" sound, which I'm certain must transcend all languages, and I get into the position she has asked. She works her hands into a hard little hammer shapes and begins pounding me on top of the head. She wails away. It hurts a little, but it also feels good. Then she uses her hammer hands to pound away at my back. Again, it hurts, but some of it feels good, so I endure. I notice at this point that she has a smell about her; she smells like dried wax and hot dogs. Then, with her shoes off, she begins to walk on my legs. She's surprisingly light. Her weight barely registers.

Once the time is mercifully up, she climbs down and puts on her shoes. It's hard to tell who is more relieved, her or me. I sign a slip of paper confirming that I just received a one hour massage for 6,300 yen (about $60). After she's gone, I look into the bathroom mirror and start laughing. Man, sometimes, what the goddamn shit hell.

Moral of the story: Just because your hotel room phone has a MASSAGE button does not mean that one should always press it.

Ah, just look at me; one day here and already I'm learning things.

Teti and I are in Tokyo all this week, staying at the Shinguku Prince Hotel, a hotel that has no gym whatsover, but on the plus side, it does have a button on the in-room telephone clearly labeled MASSAGE.

They also sell beer in the vending machines down the hall. And little bottles of red wine. And some liquors. This is a most refreshing change of pace from British Columbia where one must traverse dozens of blocks just to reach a beer and wine store that will probably already be closed by the time you get there. Hooray for Canada most of the time, but boo on this issue.

I also noticed a nearby business called "Men's Relaxation Space," which I'm fairly certain is a place for men to, well, relax in the oldest, most relaxing way that men know how to relax.

Finally, my hotel room is on the 20th floor and features this vertigo-inducing view:

Teti found this place. God bless his little crabby heart. I just got a new camera, so I'm still monkeying around with it, but if I can take a halfway decent night-time shot, I'll post it later on.

Stay tuned all week long for our posts from the TGS parties, the happenings, the doings, the get-togethers, the after-doings, and, of course, the inevitable awkwardness.

-jones

Funny thing about PAX. There's press here--I saw Garnett, Totilo, Fahey, Gerstmann, etc.--but the show isn't really about press. Yes, there's a grotty little media room here. Yes, there are some off-site events that are press-only, like Sony's event at the Hyatt across the street.

But for the most part, the press is treated as an afterthought. We're welcome to come and look around, but this show, more so than any I've ever attended, is about the fans.

Want to see Left 4 Dead 2? I have to wait in the long, winding line to do so, just like anyone else. Which is fine. I don't mind. There's none of the backroom culture that pervades the other shows. There are no secret doors, and no gratis soft drinks, and no gratis stale danish to gnaw on.

It's games and fans with none of the political horseshit and public relations posturing that typically comes between the two.

You know, I like it here.

I remember going to some obscure game convention in the early '90s when I was living in Chicago. I'd read about it in the paper. I cajoled a friend of mine, who was a far more casual gamer than I was, to go with me. He reluctantly agreed. We bought tickets. We waited in long lines.

It didn't take long for my friend to lapse into full-on eye-roll mode. Me? I was in my glory. I got the chance to play a minute or two of games I'd been reading about obsessively in EGM each month (back then it was still known as Electronic Gaming Monthly, which if you think about it, is kind of a terrible name for a magazine). I'd spend hours each day staring at screenshots--remember when screenshots still mattered?--imagining with every nerdy ounce of my being what those screenshots would look like in motion.

And here I was, in an overlit convention center in Chicago, inhaling boiled hot-dog air, waiting my turn to spend 30 seconds, maybe a minute if I was lucky, standing at a kiosk and playing one of those very games.

I wasn't happy a lot at the time. I was drinking a lot. I was working as waiter. (Quite possibly the worst waiter the city of Chicago has ever known.) But in this moment, holding a Genesis controller, or a Super Nintendo controller, in my hand, in these brief moments, I was impossibly happy.

And I have PAX to thank for reminding me of that.