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Ueno Panda
Originally uploaded by apes_abroad.

One of the reasons we get a place near Ueno is because it’s close to Ueno Zoo one of our favorite places in Tokyo. It’s probably the best zoo we’ve ever been to… I’m not sure who it’s really competing with on that front. I don’t think any other zoos really come close. And at 7$ it’s also one of the most affordable things to do in Tokyo.

Right as soon as we got into the Zoo we saw a change. Previously the adorable little Red Pandas had held the position of prominence near the entrance. Now the Red Pandas have been banished to the bowels of the bear section (they aren’t really in bowels, it’s a very nice area they live in now). They have been roughly displaced by their bigger, showier cousins the _Giant_ Panda.

Pandas are a zoos dream really. Rare, interestingly coloured, interesting history and cultural importance. Plus they are an active, human like, showy creature. So there was quite a crowd around the Pandas but it was still really cool to see them because they are rare, interestingly coloured, have interesting history and cultural importance. Plus they are an active, human like, showy creatures.

Moving on from the Pandas it seems like everything was having babies! There was a baby black bear, a baby kangaroo, baby cats, baby gorilla(!) baby everything! The great thing about youth is it makes you jump around doing stuff and harassing your elders all the time. Which is pretty fun to watch!

I also really like the Marmosets because they’re the only animal in the zoo that has any interest in humans. I don’t know if it’s my facial hair or that I’m always trying to mess with them but they seem to really like me. I could get a little group of them all following me around with their eyes. I like it when animals do this because you can make it difficult for them. You can peek back and forth around a branch or make them swivel their heads back and forth if they are looking behind them. Just some very simple interaction like following your head with their eyes and you can invent an inter-species game. Pretty fun.

I’m incredibly impressed with Ueno Zoo’s ability to strip away walls. There’s a really big lake filled with giant Lilly leaves. There are some big trees and little islands to one side on the lake which the Ring-Tailed Lemurs get the run of. The Lemurs have no walls, I guess they just don’t like to swim. We sat and had some hot chocolate while watching the Lemurs cavort around their domain.

They also have sloths in the trees growing in the middle of the path and Japanese Raccoons in the trees growing inside a high spiraled walkway. They also have Cockatiels outside with no cage. Last time they appeared to have flown away. This time they were present! Actually they don’t let the raccoons climb around in the trees anymore. They must have escaped!

The tiger also put on a hell of a show for us. Stalking around its enclosure and right up to the glass eyeing all the gawkers. You could easily imagine catching sight of one in the jungle and shitting yourself in terror.

So, well done Ueno zoo! We might even go back. There was apparently a baby Black Rhino we didn’t see!

Tokyo Game Show
Originally uploaded by apes_abroad.

The main attraction for us in Tokyo is the Tokyo Game Show. Yes because it’s a huge famous game expo, but more because I am presenting Incredipede at Sense of Wonder Night!

SOWN is a two hour show at the Tokyo Game Show showcasing odd and wonderful games. It’s a bit of a tonic for the main expo hall. The main hall is all big-budget games which tend to be pretty conservative in their design. If you were spending twenty million dollars you’d be conservative too. I was invited to present Incredipede at SOWN so that’s why we’re spending a month it Tokyo before leaving to meet Ron and Arlie in the Philippines.

The expo floor itself was pretty fun. Like I said, it was mostly dilled with shooters and rythm games and sequels to shooters and rythm games, but there was some good stuff too. A bunch of asian colleges had really nice booths with a half dozen games each. Their games were reliably bizarre and crazy. Not polished at all, but wacky as hell. So we spent most of our time playing those games.

We also played the new Final Fantasy (what? 13? I dun remember) but playing a game that is all plot and menus is pretty hard when you don’t speak the language. We did spend a bunch of time playing Soul Calibur 5 because I can apparently spend any arbitrary amount of time playing Soul Calibur. The Playism [playism.jp] booth was pretty damn rad too. They had a bunch of indie games that were really fun. We ended up hanging out with the playism guys as well as the indies showing at their booth.

One of the stand out oddities was BrainKiss. Two people don headbands and clip a thing to their ear and then stare into each other’s eyes. The game then tells you if you are interested in each other. One of the guys who works on it was showing it to us and he spoke perfect English. He was noticeably nervous about a couple playing it. I don’t think he had high confidence that it would return the verdict we wanted. But we braved the machine and stared longingly into each other’s eyes for fifteen seconds. Sarah apparently loves me but I didn’t do so well :/ I blame my nervousness about my talk!

The talk itself was really fun and went really well. I’ve written more about it here.

The day after the talk we met up with Pierre and his girlfriend Chinatsu. Pierre moved to Tokyo to teach English about four years ago. We met up with him last time we were in Tokyo (about four years ago) and haven’t seen him since! It was great fun hanging out with them. We started with lunch and then hit up Kinokuniya books. Kinokuniya is my favorite book store in SF. If you visited us in San Francisco then I probably dragged you there. There aren’t many of them in the world, a few in Tokyo and then one in Japan Town SF, but their collection of art, design, photography, and architecture books is amazing. The one in Shinjuku we went to did not disappoint. Among the treasures we were flipping through an amazing frog photography book considering art styles for Incredipede.

Chinatsu knew about a Nepalese fair that was going on in Harijuku so we jumped on a train and headed out there. It was really fun. There must be a fair Nepalese population in Tokyo because there were a lot of vendors with only Nepalese characters on their signs. I walked up to one of these and spied some mutton stew that was fantastic. I get bored of Japanese food pretty fast so this was a really nice switch. Also there was wrestling! High flying, pile driving wrestling! So that was pretty fun. We also took a nice walk in the park to cool down from all the choke-holds.

After that we wandered the streets of Tokyo. This is definitely one of my favorite pass times. We walked past lots of interesting places. Including an invite-only jewelry store, a vw micro-bus with a pizza-oven in it (serving lunch at a farmer’s market), a giant lit-from-inside paper mache samurai being paraded around the street being followed by three huge Taiko drums plus lots more. Tokyo is an amazing city. We stopped for coffee in a Blenz (Canadian themed!) before heading off for dinner. Pierre and Chinatsu showed us this amazing neuvo hippy,Indonesian curry place called Magic Spice in Shimokitazawa. Here check out their website, it’s a pretty accurate representation of the mood they have going: http://www.magicspice.net/

The food was really terrific and it’s one of the few places in Tokyo you can actually get things spicy.

After dinner we wandered into an _amazing_ store called Village Vanguard. It blew my mind three separate times. It was kind of like a party nick-nack shop you might find in Canada but instead of having chincy crap it had amazing stuff. Including: the wooden keyboard I’ve been lusting after for years (mind blown), a Theo Jansen build-your-own-Theo-Jansen-thing model kit (mind blown) and several Japanese copies of “1000 games you have to play before you die” which happens to contain Fantastic Contraption so I got to show Chinatsu and Pierre my game in print (mind blown).

By that time it was 11:00 and after all the roaming around we were pretty tired so we said farewell for now and headed home. That was yesterday. Today we’re taking it easy and just writing a lot of emails and blog posts. Tomorrow? God who knows in this city.

Japan
Originally uploaded by apes_abroad.

We flew in to Haneda airport in midafternoon, but it could have been 2am for all we knew after 30-some hours since our heads had touched pillow. We bought Passmo pay cards which work on all the trains and subways now, and also vending machines and even restaurants around the city. Finally, a kind of debit card for hopelessly cash-driven Tokyo! We ate tempura udon (and paid via vending machine, naturally) and headed for the Sakura House offices in Shinjuku.

I’d been prepared for hot weather but the humidity (32C feels like 36) was hard to take in our travel clothes and backpacks. I noticed women daintily dabbing the sweat from their faces with tiny lace-trimmed towels and stopped to buy one for myself – it’s been a lifesaver. We now understand why there are drink vending machines on every second block in this city. These are record high temperatures for September, but August often gets up to a sweltering 35C/95F.

Sakura House dominates the long-term foreiner housing market here, offering reasonably priced rooms with shared bathrooms and kitchens. Most importantly, they don’t charge “reikin” which is the standard moving-in fee. Also known as “key money”, it’s considered a gift to the landlord, equivalent to up to three month’s rent. I guess people don’t move very often around here!

At their office we signed reams and reams of documents, promising to follow proper garbage separation rules, agreeing not to share files on the local lan, and itemizing everything in the apartment down to the number of spoons – 2. We took the refreshingly air conditioned Yamanote line back to our room in Asakusa Iriya house. Look, they’re so organized our room even has a video on Youtube.

It’s actually a bit of a dump. Not surprising given the low price, but with all the crap they made us sign you’d have thought we were moving into a palace. The furniture’s cheap and mismatched, the windows are a meter from neighboring buildings, the garbage hasn’t been taken out in a month (remember the heat…) and the door doesn’t lock. Not that we’re worried about crime here. However, it’s quiet and our room is relatively big with its own kitchen and working aircon, tatami floors and two Japanese style futons that joined together are bigger than a king-sized bed! We have only one ghostly housemate who may not even speak English, and as I mentioned doesn’t like to take the garbage out.

I chose this place for the location in Taito-ku, between the bustling street markets and pleasant parks of Ueno to the east, and the traditional temple district of Asakusa to the west. It’s an older part of the city with two and three story buildings, and seemingly no local zoning laws. Next door is a tiny slacklining gym, and at the end of the street trucks are loaded with sheets of glass during the day. There are restaurants and combinis dotted around every block, yet it maintains the feel of a quiet residential neighborhood, lined with potted plants and filled with children playing. Our walk to Ueno takes us through the household shrine shopping district, where store after identical store blasts cool air onto the street, inticing people to browse through their shiny wooden cabinets.

Next up: the Tokyo Game Show!

Sarah and Mrs Mooberry
Originally uploaded by apes_abroad.

As usual the weather in BC was totally perfect this summer. For July and August we stayed with and generally mooched off our awesome families (although I did try to do some cooking). We went snorkeling in the almost-don’t-need-a-wetsuit ocean around Nanaimo, toured local farms and wineries in Cowichan Bay and Saltspring Island, and searched for frogs at Ammonite Falls. I worked hard to finish Rebuild 2 which is now in sponsor bidding.

Labor Day weekend found us once again in Seattle for PAX which was nearly overrun with indies this year, many of them our friends. We spent the usual nights drinking and playing board games with our friends from San Francisco and Vancouver. We stayed to help pack up, affording us a behind-the-scenes peek at the incredible ballet that is the expo hall tear down.

We stayed a couple extra days and went to a Mariner’s game with our cousins Pete and Leah, which was my first baseball game. We had incredible seats – the first two rows right behind the LA Angels, who lost even though Pete says they were the better team. It was the most fun I’ve ever had at any sporting event.

Our plan was to stay in BC until the end of Septebmer but Colin heard quite suddenly that he’d been accepted to present his new game at Sense of Wonder Night at the Tokyo Game Show. Unfortunately we had to miss OrcaJam and IndieCADE this year but we squeezed in Beerfest with Colin’s parents where the theme was decidedly British style cask ales.

Then it was off to catch our 3am Air China flight to Japan…

San Francisco
Originally uploaded by apes_abroad.

Yes, the Northways came back to SF for three months, which as Colin says fits us like a glove. We’ve got to move on to BC in July, but I’m already planning our next SF visit for GDC 2012. A friend asked us for advice on what to see and do in San Francisco, and listing out all the best places for him has made me start to miss the city already. Here are, more or less, our favourite things to do in SF:

If you’re going to be there on a Thursday, start by planning that day around the Academy of Sciences nightlife event – adults-only cocktails in an aquarium! That starts at 6:00pm in Golden Gate Park, so you can spend the day in and around Golden Gate Park. Start by taking the N Judah MUNI train (here’s a bus map), get off at Carl & Cole (great sushi for dinner there) and walk down to Haight & Ashbury and Magnolia’s brewpub for brunch because it’s never too early for a beer.

Stroll down to the park, check out the drummers on hippie hill, and make your way to the museums. Across from the academy is the De Young which has awesome creepy skulls and fetishes from New Guinea, and a sweet tower that’s free to go up with a view of the city. Nearby on 9th is the new Social Kitchen brewpub and Arizmendi which has delicious pizza and other baked yum you can pick up for later.

If you have time, come back to the park on a Sunday when they close the first half of JFK drive for people to ride their bikes (rent bikes at Haight & Stanyan). If the weather is warm (March-April is best; in July-August expect sunny mornings and chill windy afternoons), go all the way to Ocean Beach and follow the walking trails north through the ruins of Sutro Baths to Golden Gate Bridge. The trails continue east from the bridge along the water all the way to pier 49 but it’s a long way; better to head in to Geary to catch the 38 bus back. But first stop at the Russian importers for some sausage and poppyseed pastries. It’s always good to have snax for later.

I think Alcatraz is overrated and pier 49 is a tourist hell hole, but it’s worth going just for the Musee Mechanique. Then you can walk from there to check out the best parts of North Beach and Chinatown. Hike up to the base of Coit Tower then walk down the paths on the east side to Embarcadero. Follow that south along the water south to the Ferry Building which is cool in a yuppie kind of way, especially when they have the farmer’s market on Sunday.

In terms of museums the Exploratorium is my favorite, but it’s best if you can go to their monthly after dark event so you don’t have to share all the cool interactive science stuff with the dumb kids it was designed for. Colin likes the SFMOMA and YBCA art galleries just south of market near 4th, and there’s a comic book museum and other little galleries nearby that are cool, and free the first Tuesday of every month.

That’s it for downtown though. I wouldn’t bother with the area around powell, market, and union square because it’s just commercial tourist blah, and busy. Avoid wandering into the Tenderloin west of union square around 6th + market unless you’re looking to buy some crack or converse with crazy people.

The cable car museum near chinatown is free and cool, and if you must take a cable car, the California line is the easiest to get a seat on. You can take it to the end then walk down to Van Ness to hit up Tommy’s Joynt (or perhaps somewhere classier).

Take the BART to the Mission to find all kinds of good restaurants, urban culture and people speaking Spanish. Wander between 24th and 16th, Valencia and Mission st. It’s what I think of as the “real” San Francisco, and it’s a little grimy. It can’t be denied, SF is a stinky city and inhabited by a lot of homeless people. That’s part of the… charm? Head up to the Castro for a break; it’s much trendier and whiter and gayer.

If you have a car and can organize who gets to drink and who has to drive, our favourite outside-the-city thing is to do a day of wine tastings around the Russian River area to the north. It’s a couple boring hours on the highway to get out there but once you do the roads meander and the countryside is lovely. There’s a burger place called Mike’s At The Crossroads that’s great for loading up on grease first, and another brewpub in Santa Rosa for when you’re sick of wine. If you don’t want to go so far, buy some $5 wine from Trader Joe’s and have a picnic on the hills just north of the Golden Gate bridge (if it’s not too foggy – earlier in the day is better).

And of course before you go, take a look at what events are going to be on, maybe take in a concert or a play. I love a good street fair or craft fair, and then there’s Bay to Breakers, Gay Pride, LoveFest, the Folsom Street Fair (scary!), etc. SF likes to throw big, weird parties.

For those who might not know, we started a new development blog at NorthwayGames.com for game and work-related stuff. We’ll continue posting here again when we’re “abroad” once more in French Polynesia this fall.