Archive: June 29th, 2004: Taisen Hot Gimmick Cosplay Mahjong / Insert Credit

“I visited Japan in February of this year, and during my stay, Asobitcity announced its closure, and Yamagiwa Soft burned to the ground.

It’s unusual, I guess, that my most concrete memories of both stores are of their pornography sections. “

I’ve been taking a short break from filling in my archive chronologically, but here’s the piece of writing which followed on from my Viewtiful Joe review in November 2003; it might seem strange that I took a gap of about 7 months between articles, but I was working through my third year of university at the time. Which sounds very noble and productive, however I did miss the first week of the second term to visit Japan.

Shortly after the visit I wrote at least one article about the trip, but they never really amounted to much more than “What I Did On My Holidays, by Mathew Kumar, age 22 and 2 months” so I shelved (and have subsequently lost) them, but they turned into the first page of this review. This is probably one of those articles that people would refer to as “new games journalism”, because the definition of NGJ is trapped somewhere between Kieron Gillen’s “gaming discussed as personal experience” and Tim Rogers’ “personal experience as a framework for discussing gaming”. This is the latter; I use my personal experience of playing Taisen Hot Gimmick in an arcade in Harajuku to explain the rules of Mahjong, before writing a fairly straightforward review on the second page.

I like this piece – it’s was written confidently and covers a genre that is given next to no coverage in English. I haven’t played Mahjong in ages (my set weighs an ton, so I didn’t bring it with me to Toronto) and I’ve wanted to review one of the many Mahjong titles for DS for quite a while (the Mario branded Yakuman DS, perhaps), but sadly I don’t really have the money for such frivolities.

This article is a good example of why I started this workblog, too – the Insert Credit archives are so broken not one of my articles after the Viewtiful Joe review are actually linked to on an easily accessible page!

August 26th, 2006 : Archive, Insert Credit, Reviews