Yesterday I went to the local EB Games here in Vancouver to buy a copy of Final Fantasy XII.

In related news, pigs were seen flying over several North American cities yesterday.

When I was at the store, I saw these two games prominently displayed in the PS2 section: 

That's right: Trapt and Zathura. They sound like titles of games that someone who knows nothing about games would make up.

I can imagine my mother saying, "What are you doing in there for hours on end? Playing Zathura again or whatever the hell it's called? Why don't you go out and get a job? Why don't you have more friends? Why can't you be more like your brother!!!!!"

Ahem.

Sorry for that.

Anyway, back to Final Fantasy XII.

When John Teti and I were in Tokyo a few weeks back, the top floor of the Shinjuku Prince Hotel featured a very fine establishment called FUGA.

We would retire there in the evenings and drink extremely weak gin and tonics and hold forth on various subjects like politics, religion, sex, the "greening" of the tech industry, and Final Fantasy.

Teti and I are friends, despite our age difference. He's the oldest young man I know.

Anyway, one boozey night, in the name of cementing our friendship, after about 900,004 weak gin and tonics at FUGA, I pledged to him that I would finish ONE Final Fantasy game before I die. 

He said, "Fine, and that Final Fantasy will be Final Fantasy XII."

First impressions of the box: The box cover has all kinds of blonde people on it, trying to look like toughs, and things that look like airships. Airships! I don't see any chocobos on there, so that's good... The back of the box says DISCOVER THE SECRET THAT WILL UNRAVEL AN EMPIRE.

That does sound like fun...

Anyway, I'm a man of my word.

Check back here for my Final Fantasy XII updates as they happen.

Here at Crispy Gamer, we kid because we love.

And we love Ryan Kuo.

Seriously, this guy has turned out to be an integral part of Team Crispy. I personally didn't want to hire him. I know! He seemed kind of mopey during his interview. (Which I now realize is just one weapon in his toolbox of insidious charms.) And he went to Harvard, which only made me not want to hire him even more, because I think all Harvard people, once in their lifetimes, should not get at least one job they've applied for. And he didn't seem like much of a gamer. And...well, I could continue, but you get the idea.

Ryan has turned out to be awesome to work with. He puts on his headphones and slouches in his office chair and just makes shit happen. Sometimes he leaves the office and never tells us where he goes. But he always comes back. Always. Sometimes carrying a sandwich from a sandwich shop none of us have ever heard of before. He originally was Vogel's sidekick/henchman, but he quickly outgrew that role and came into his own as a gamer, as an editor, and as a writer. No one gets more excited about obscure iPhone games than Ryan does. NO ONE. Follow him on Twitter; you'll see. (@twerkface)

The guy is passionate. No joke. Which brings me to my "we kid because we love" sentiment. There are a couple of running jokes about Ryan in the office. (FYI: If we don't have any running jokes about you, it probably means we don't like you.) One running joke is that Ryan is a sucker for any indie-scented, indie-flavored game. One time we caught him in the office playing Blueberry Garden. Blueberry Garden! "I have to play this for a review, guys," he said while clicking away at his mouse. One other time we caught him playing something so obscure, none of us had even heard of the game he was playing.

Running joke number two is that Ryan loves all games for the first five minutes. Seriously. Pick any game, put the controller in his hand, and boom, watch that smile come out of his typically somber face like the sun on a cloudy day.

It's beautiful.

So when Teti and I were in Tokyo a few weeks back, staying at the minus-two-star-rated, nicotine-soaked Shinjuku Prince Hotel, I noticed the incredibly lengthy hallways outside our doors and snapped a picture. Teti and I agreed that the photo looked a lot like a screenshot for an indie game that Ryan would enjoy playing.

Our plan was to mock up the photo, pixellate it a bit, and then tell Ryan about this cool new indie game we saw at the Tokyo Game Show called "The Hallway." 

But the more we thought about it, the more we decided that April 1st was too far off for us to get away with this, and that this joke might be too cruel, even by our normally cruel standards.

For once in our lives, Teti and I rose above our petty urges.

Instead, I have decided to turn "The Hallway" into a loving tribute to the wonderful Ryan Kuo.

Ryan: Keep on making our world go around, sir. And don't go back to med school. Don't even think about it.

Because between all the kidding and loving (and kidding) that we do, I'm pretty sure that Crispy Gamer would not be "Crispy Gamer" anymore without you.

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.

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