HOTARU NO HAKA

I have recently seen Hotaru no Haka (grave of the fireflies) while I was spending my night at coding a few things for work and I have to say that it is a real masterpiece.

Saying that I liked it would be the wrong statement, it is more something about a sense of deep respect. I have been unable to detach my eyes from the video from the beginning to the end.

If you are empathic probably the end of the movie will leave you with a bad feeling about the story, the author has been really good at imprinting a sense of nostalgy describing how the japan during the second world war has fallen from a "mighty empire" to a nation without food for its children.

Indeed one of the best movies at involving emotionally the viewer that I have evern seen.

Geneve Trip

Recently I decided to spent a day in Geneve to relax a bit and look for cool things around. We arrived in the city just to discover that they were in progress of replacing the current railway with the playmobil one, they say that it has lower maintenance costs!

First of we had lunch, Vietnamese vegetables noodles and Thai green curry noodles. Green curry with coconut milk is really good it's a shame that it is hard to find it here in Italy.

Swiss Burger King produced the Fondue Burger, if you ever tried fondue it is something like having an overdose of cheese, mixing melt cheese with the steakhouse burgers seems murderously good!

The next morning we decided to move forward for some shopping, and I have discovered that cause of the night freeze my car glass broke. Good time to test my glass insurance :/

Anyway we reached my favorite shopping center in the city, if you are in swiss you cannot avoid buying some chocolate, we have really good chocolate in Turin too, but you know... swiss chocolate is a myth.

My son decided that it was time for a snack and we took a pause at Starbucks to have an hot mocha. He took a frappuccino too, but he said that he prefers his own milk.

I have been also shocked by the fact that they have fresh Shitake mushrooms! I thought that it would have been impossible to find them in europe but it seems that I was wrong. I promised myself to buy some of them next time that I go back.

Virtual Boy

A few posts ago I talked about the Virtual Boy. I used to have one of them, but many people never seen one and so I decided to show what it was about!

VirtualBoy was a 3D console released from Nintendo that used stereoscopic vision to provide 3D images, like what you get now at the cinema with those funny glasses. I probably never sold a lot due to the fact that you had to put a huge "War of the worlds tripod" on you face but the games where indeed cool

WarioLand was my favourite game for VirtualBoy, but I used to like also Mario Tennis (which came with the console itself) and Teleroboxer.



For the 1995 it was pretty damn cool, but the world never loved it, probably due to the fact that while each computer geek was excited by the fact of seeing the world in 3D black and red polygons each and every other child on the earth ended being sick after a few minutes of gameplay. Also, I would not call it a "portable console" as Nintendo tried to do.

SuperPotato

If you have ever been in Akihabara you cannot forget that unique 8bit music playing around when you pass near this big black block. When you can hear it, you know that SuperPotato is nearby!

If you ever installed an emulator like ZSNES or MAME on your computer you will probably think that this place is very similar to how it should look heaven. They have a huge collection of pratically any console and game available even from the beginning of the home gaming environment.

Venus Wars

Venus Wars has just been broadcasted on the italian channel Man-Ga so I have been able to see it for the first time.

 As a cyberpunk world lover I was quite curious to see it, at first impression it remembered me a bit Akira, probably due to the motorcycle, but in the end I have to say that my expectations didn't meet.

Anyway I'm glad to have spent my evening watching it because, probably due to the fact that it was long time since I saw a cyberpunk manga, it remembered me a lot when I was playing Snatcher which was a really cool game. Indeed Snatcher has a totally different environment and color scheme, but human mind is strange...
If you never played snatcher take an emulator and give it a try, it was a really cool game and it even cited Metal Gear as a "20th centuries threat".

To be honest I always preferred the SD Snatcher game as I always loved J-RPG and hey! It even has Super Deformed graphic, what else can you ask? It was really cool to play on my MSX2.

In the end, all this made me want to immerse in the cyberpunk universe again, so it even made me more eager to get a copy of the upcoming Deus Ex: Human Revolution. I really hope that it will be as good as it is expected to be, it's long time since I really got caught from the story of a game.

Cool Hokkaido

Tokyoing Around groups the best videos I find on the web about Tokyo and Japan.

NHK World has recently broadcasted a nice episode of the "Cool Hokkaido" series. The episode subject is "nostalgia" and it focuses on Otaru. The environment and subject is really relaxing so it is valuable to take a look at the episode.

People with Satellite can view NHK World on satellite, in Italy it is available to Sky users by performing an "other channels" search. Otherwise you can see this specific episode on YouTube

Itadakimasu!

Preparing for a big party here! After three days my order from shopthai.eu arrived on time providing my forniture of japanese curry for the year to come!

When I was in Tokyo I couldn't stop eating curry with tonkatsu, it was indeed my favourite food around, so when I came back in Italy I started to look for japanese curry resellers and started ordering a good amount every year.

This time I also took teriyaki dressing, shitake mushroom and a good amount of miso paste. I'm looking forward to having my first curry based dinner, so... what else to say? いただきます!