No weed here in Japan, so I had to beer. Beer = truth serum = lots of trouble! Bashing keys till the sun came up, crashed at some point then hit the streets of Ikebukuro to raid Tokyu Hands and scoff down some JDM Maccas! #bliss #daywrittenoff
And then holy shit… we could see Mt. Fuji today!!!
30% chance to see = we win!
Next stop, Yokohama!
Shinjuku! I’m home!
Finally! Tonkotsu!
Tonight’s tiny room at The Prince.
Woke up in a dream, I swear. The lake, the tatami matts, green tea, fuck! Where has this been all my life?! Sadly had to check out and hit the road again, but not before passing by Mt. Fuji and seeing it as clear as day (we couldn’t see the peak at all yesterday). Spirits were really high after that, and we hit the road to Yokohama, then Asakusa Temple (I had never been). I’m buggered from all the walking! Tours are relentless! How do these old ladies manage?! It’s crazy!
Hitting Shinjuku was unreal. Literally driving past the last hotel I stayed at with the Acquired Taste boys brought back memories and great vibes. I feel like I’m home!
Tomorrow we have a free day, no plans! That’s the way you should do Tokyo! So looking forward to it!
Lots of tourists about. In frustration I hit this bell as hard as I could and turned a fair few heads LOL!
Find your Zen.
Beauty in the small things. Japan is full of it!
These eggs have been dipped in the hot springs of Owakudani, Hakone. When they’re dipped the eggs go black! Amazingly it doesn’t happen at any other hot spring in Japan but this one!
I HAD to buy a few, apparently you love to be 100, or gain 100 years if you have one so I forced a few of the group to have one as it’s 5 for $5 and I sure as hell wasn’t gonna eat 5 eggs and live to be 500!
Jimmy, he’s so awesome. Love the guy! Not a bad bone in his body, those kind of peoples always impress.
Mum & I. SO good to see mum so happy!
Tina and Lucy. Snow makes everyone a little kid!
Soba lunch!
Met this amazing 81 yr old Indonesian man on the way to Mt. Fuji today. He was smoking gudang garams like a chimney and had piercing blue eyes! When I asked him about his eyes (in the best Indo I could manage) he said they were brown, and over the years they’ve turned blue!!! Had to ask him for a shot! So glad I did.
Mt. Fuji! *sigh
My room overlooking the lake at Kawaguchiko is SO wow!
We were given Kimono’s to wear to dinner, got mine on so wrong!
Group shot!
Dinner ended too early so a few of us headed back into the lobby to buy more beers from the vending machine and play some pong and Mum played some piano.
We’ve been a little bit unlucky with the Sakura opening in time, and today we had a little more bad luck with not being able to see Mt. Fuji. Ah well! What can you do?! Still one of the most enjoyable days so far on tour. The older ladies love me, and I love them! It’s been great vibes, great laughs, lots of banter and jokes.
We are spending the night in a traditional Japanese hotel tonight, sleeping on the floor on tatami matts. My room is absolutely amazing! I can’t help but want to shoot someone in this room! It’s just SO beautiful and will be even more beautiful in the morning light.
Bamboo forest was impossible to shoot, just SO many tourists being a Sunday (God damn it!!!).
Group shot! YUP! We’re a HUGE group!
Nature design.
Kei.
Traditional Japanese lunch.
Lucy putting in the Fish paste.
We’re getting closer to Tokyo!
Dead stock JDM DC5R.
Yakiniku for dinner on a road stop.
Jimmy the B’Day boy! The guy is a dead set champ!
Tonight’s room.
We had an early start to try to beat the crowds to the bamboo forest, but being a Sunday it was pretty damn packed and it was nearly impossible to get a decent shot. Can’t help but feel a little disappointed with the bamboo forrest. I’ve seen SO many amazing shots online, but in reality it just wasn’t that amazing?! Maybe I’m here at the wrong season? Or maybe, somehow everyone’s images are deceiving?!
Next door to the bamboo forrest was Tenryu-ji Temple, designated by the UN as a World Cultural Heritage site it’s pretty much where ZEN was born! (head temple of the Rinzai Zen Buddhism 1339). Amazing gardens, unfortunately the sakura still aren’t blooming! I’ve seen a few photos on insta though, of people in Tokyo right now, and they’re shooting fully open Sakura, so it looks like were still in for a treat!
Mt. FUJI tomorrow! 30% chance to see it due to the cold weather (meaning snow on the roads). Fingers crossed!!!
Woke up at 4AM, first in at 6am. Japanese buffet brekkie!
Our first stop today was Kiyomizu Temple.
The Sakura are starting to open!
Good luck charms.
Mum getting her Zen on.
Therapy.
Our guide Sayuri!
We then walked on to the Gion area in search for Geishas!
And then we spotted some, hanging with some grandpa’s who looked like they were having a blast.
Then I spotted this crane. And I was mesmerised.
The shop owner came out at some point and fed it in the river next to the shop! So rad!
I’m honestly blown away at how different Osaka and Kyoto are from Tokyo. Can’t wait to come back and spend quality tie in these areas without a tour.
Boomers on Tour!
Sunset in Kyoto. So good it stopped raining today!
Then we checked into a new hotel, much more grand than the last. Of-course I get level 8!
My room.
We ducked out for dinner and found a dark little lane behind the hotel and chose a restaurant to eat at. Loved the little box ad wooden lock system on their show lockers!
Of-course I get Gate 8! I’ve had some pretty severe family issues going on for a while now, definitely nothing to brag about… I thought there would be nothing better than to spend some quality time with my fave person on the planet, and that’s my Mum, so we’re off to Japan together for 8 days, a country which she took me to nearly every year as a child, should be a blast!
Mum!
We’re going on a budget tour, but I’m flying with Mum, and that means in style! These chairs flatten right out into a bed, and damn I literally teleported to HK!!!
We’ve left 3 months of rain in Sydney for more rain… Boo! Tour guide says it’ll be sunny tomorrow though!
We only made a quick transit in HK, then we landed in Osaka.
As soon as we stepped out in to the airport we were greeted by Airport Staff in bright outfits handing out candy! Japan!
Pikachu!
Land of Boss.
Oh and fuck, it’s raining here too…
Haha, nice!
We landed in Osaka SUPER early, which meant we couldn’t check into the hotel yet, so instead the tour started straight away, pretty hard going for a bunch of oldies on tour, but you get what you pay for?! We headed straight for Osaka Temple.
We’ve literally come at the perfect time. The Cherry Blossoms are JUST about to pop open! Will do so over the next few days.
There was an absolutely insane historical Samurai armour display in the Castle, but no photography! Massive bummer.
After the Castle we then checked out Dotonbori, the shopping district.
Spotted: Saintside!!!
Lots and lots of paper mache signs, some, like this crab were animated (which brings me back to seeing one of these signs animating for the very first time when I was a little boy in Japan).
My first purchase!
Love the Japanese! One of the poor old ladies got lost, for at least a couple of hours in the busy streets of Dotonbori (on a very cold and wet night to boot!). The tour guides did nothing about it, and one of the more occa guys on tour decided to stand up and tell everyone in the group that we should all go back to the hotel and call the cops. I almost got into a fist fight with the fucker (he was pretty drunk and holding a beer in hand). There was no fucking way I was going to leave an old lady on her own on the streets in a country where she didn’t speak the language…
…LUCKILY for us some young Japanese kids found her, and guided her back to the restaurant we were all meant to meet at.
One of the girls broke down in tears when she saw how happy the old lady was to be reunited with the group! SO SWEET! Night made! PS: Old mate apologised more than a few times for getting worked up too, that’s a good thing as I’ll be on the tour with him for the next week!
Shabu Shabu!
Ah that budget tour. We had to walk 5 minutes in the rain, with our luggage, to the hotel! HAHAH! So awesome.
Love my little room though, so typical of cheaper hotel rooms in Japan. In fact identical to the last one I stayed in, in Tokyo!
Always remove the lower power tab off the bottom of a powerboard and bring it with you, plug it in to an adapter and you’re good to go to charge your laptop, phone and camera batteries!
This fan made video is awesome, and literally a love letter to the game itself! It’s what pushed me over the edge to hit the buy it now button (and I’m glad I did!)!
I’m a vampire. I swear. I’m 41, and feel like I’ve done so much and lived forever. Where I have lived on, my friends have gone, so I keep making new young friends in life, but eventually they all go too (“Going” in this case probably means getting married and having kids and moving on with their lives rather than dying, but you get my analogy?!).
Something that many might not know about me is that I am a huge vampire fan. I grew up on Anne Rice novels, and loved everything she wrote (later on I read her erotic novels which she published under a fake name, they were super fucked up!!!). Her novel “Interview with the Vampire” ended up becoming a pretty successful movie, one which I’ve watched a few times, and enjoyed (but ultimately I love Bram Stroker’s 1992 Dracula starring Garry Oldman as the Nosferatu the most).
I was more punk than goth when I was younger, but I hung out with goths all day long as my long term girlfriend Caryn at the time (we dated for 7 years) was sister to Sydney’s King Goth Charles Gillespie, who ran and owned Club 77 for years, had Marylin Manson hang out at his house, which has so many dead animals hanging on the walls you’d think you were hanging out at an abattoir!
I collected and read the entire Sandman series of graphic novels by Neil Gaiman too, love his artwork, love the fantasy world he has created, love Dave McKeon’s heavy layered photoshop work (a huge inspiration to me back in high school). I’m still hopeful they will one day make a movie on The Sandman, the lore is there for the taking!
Somewhere along the lines Twilight happened, and maybe Twilight killed the vampire for me just like Fast & Furious killed car culture. Either way I’ve not really felt attached to any kind of vampiric love for a while, until now!
Enter Vampire Bloodlines. I stumbled upon this title when searching for the best Role Playing Game (RPG) of all time. It came up time and time again. Made in 2004 (it’s old!), it was a rushed release and on release it was so broken that people could not play it. The game died in the ass on release, but over time a community of fans fixed the game to the point where they’ve released an unofficial patch which realises much of what the games developers wanted to do with the game in the first place.
Isn’t that just amazing?! I’ve seen it with Fallout 4 and the community of modders who not only fix bugs in the game, but make everything about the game better, from textures through to gameplay mechanics. What you have to realise is that it’s not the developers who are shit here, it’s the fact that there are a shitload more amazing ‘developers’ in the world than in one studio, so when a game developer releases a game which the community can mod, it’s only fair that there will be better coders/designers/artists out in the world (in comparison to the smaller pool of talent in one dev team).
So, back onto vampires, goths, and games. I decided to download Bloodlines off Steam (it was $25AUD), I downloaded the official patch, installed it without issues and the game is running fine so far. There’s no way of using a controller as there are a LOT of keyboard commands you can use, it’s going to take a while for me to be completely fluent with them all, but Bloodlines isn’t exactly an action first person shooter so I’m sure I’ll feel more comfortable with the controls over time as it’s a slower paced game.
When you launch the game you’re thrown into character creation, definitely one of my favourite parts of starting any new game (and I love that dark Massive Attack like track on the home screen! Sets the mood right!).
Like Fallout New Vegas’ start with the Doc. Bloodlines starts with a psych test to help figure out what class of vampire suits you best. I loved the psych questions right away and I answered them as honest as I could, this gave me the class of “Malkavian”, the crazy ones, which I’ve read over and over again as one of the most fun play though characters in the game as their dialogue is totally whack and almost nonsensical (which then makes for some fun unexpected results when you’re forced to make a choice). The Malkavian character is one that a lot of Bloodlines players suggest as a 2nd play though just for the sheer fun of it. It’s probably not the best character for a first play though due to the fucked up dialogue, but hey it’s what I got so I’m sticking with it.
If you answered in other ways you could have gotten Nosferatu for example, these guys are so ugly that gameplay would force you to always be lurking in the shadows and underground tunnels for the entire game. Talking to other NPC’s to gather info from them becomes impossible as you’re so not human looking that most of them will scream and run away from you. Unlike Skyrim where it almost doesn’t really matter what class you choose as in the end you can get any class to work once you’re levelled up enough, with Bloodlines classes it really seems to matter which class you choose and that’s an awesome thing (especially for game re-playability).
After the character creation screen you’re thrown into a cut scene which really shows how dated the graphics are, but you know what? Despite a low polygon count the expressions on the characters are better than this year’s 2017 Mass Effect Andromeda. Far from realistic, but the expressions are there and the voice acting is bang on. The tutorial at the start throws you into the basics, yup there’s a lot you can do in this game and surprisingly it’s not just a point and click RPG but much more dynamic than I originally thought.
It turns out you can play first person and 3rd person, and you have all the controls of a FPS, and that’s because this game has been built on an early Unreal engine (blew my mind and makes so much sense as to why I’m loving it right now). Bloodlines worked originally as a turn based Dungeons and Dragons style board game of sorts, but when it went digital it didn’t do the RPG point and click Fallout 1 style game, but went right into open world FPS, much more like modern Fallout games. Really impressive.
What I’m sincerely loving the most is the general goth vibe of the game. It’s so bang on I can’t believe it, and it’s surely the real reason as to why so many people out there think the writing in this game is so good. I don’t think it’s the writing. I think it’s the fact that the guys who made this game had to be goths, or at least were mates with goths, because some bits in this game are just SO goth it brings me back, hard!
Just seeing goth guys dance on the dance floor, IT’S BANG ON! If you’ve ever seen goths dance, it looks like they’re invisible sword fencing, or they look like gorillas going through the mist.. the game nails it, and seeing other NPC’s randomly joining in on the dace floor was cool, then when I randomly decided to have a closer look at the dancers a prompt appeared for me to start dancing too, BANG ON! This is just the kind of explorative mechanic that gets me in a good game.
SO I’m barely out of the tutorial, but I’m somehow I’m already hooked. This is amaze as most games usually start out super slow and boring, especially tutorial bits. I’ve only met a couple of NPC’s so far but the ones I’ve met have been fucking amazing. One vampire by the beach I stumbled into had an Aussie accent, and a great bit of dialogue to go through. Pretty sure he wasn’t anyone special in the game, just filler, but fucking good filler at that as he was super engaging.
Really looking forward to more Bloodlines, mainly because the culture of it all feels so bang on, respectful and legit. I literally feel like I am hanging out with my old goth mates again, for real! Will post up a final review at some point I’m sure.
Ah no bull. I love bush walking and this is legit the best looking natural nature formations I’ve seen in a game, it’s the randomness of things that make nature look natural. These guys have done the Takashi Amano Nature thing so nicely!
I’m always on the hunt for immersive games to play that I haven’t played yet (that would most likely be a lot of them!). I’m defining my priorities as a gamer, and I’ve chosen to value games which create great experiences by utilising a great mix of action, story, RPG and open world.
A while back I reviewed a very strong story driven Indie game “Firewatch” (review here). I loved that it was so strong on narrative, and that it moved me, but it was light hearted and I’ve still been looking for a MYST or RIVEN like experience.
I think I’ve found it.
I’ve stumbled upon “The Vanishing of Ethan Carter” on Steam. It’s an adventure game that’s immersive from the second you load in. The first thing you read is that the games developers do not intend to hold your hand, and too right. I screwed up my first playthrough by starting a lot of puzzles, not finishing them and moving on the start other ones, which somehow sadly broke the game for me a couple of times, forcing me to start the game all over as the game doesn’t let you save whenever you want to (crazy!), instead it autosaves when you’ve completed a puzzle.
The game breaking, and having to start all over again a couple of times ended up being a GREAT thing! I’d say this game would be only about 3 hours short if you knew where to go and how to solve the puzzles, getting lost exploring, and having multiple attempts at the puzzles is what soaked up a lot of my time, and where I usually hate puzzles in games I absolutely loved every single one of the puzzles in this game.
The game is drop dead gorgeous too (check my screen shots above). For a $20 game I think it’s environments look more realistic than my modded Skyrim which uses 4K texture packs. I often found myself pausing to take a screen grab, enjoy the views, the sounds and fauna swaying in the wind.
The soundtrack is great as well, it builds up as you go, but I hate music in the background in games so for my 2nd playthrough I left the music off and found it was more way immersive. The sound design really shines when the music is off, especially the sound of your footsteps over different terrain.
Do give this game a go if you’re after something different (find it on Steam, it’s a small download). It’s beautiful, creepy, dark and tragic all at the same time. It’s super short (I’d say a 5hr playthrough if you do everything there is to do in the game), but that’s alright for the price. It’s also got a GREAT ending which has had me pondering way after I’ve put the game down (also, there’s a sniper rifle “easter egg” to be found in the game, must have if you’re a completionist!).
PS: If you do get lost in the game, use this guide (helped me out with the one tricky puzzle I couldn’t beat!).
Crazy, right?! I have DIVINE tattooed on my left arm. The tattoo means a LOT to me, but Star truly does deserve the word with some of the shit she’s been through in life, and I’m honoured that I mean so much to her. We booked in to Tora Sumi in Balmain, Eduardo Star’s tattoo artist was an awesome dude, Star took the needle like a champ and she’s so ecstatic with the end result!
