1214: Inner Sanctum

Mark and I played a bunch of a recently-released indie game today. That game is Coffee Stain Studios' Sanctum 2, which I purchased a copy of for Mark as a thank-you present for putting us up for the last couple of weeks, and which I was also interested in playing. I enjoyed the original game's interesting fusion of tower defense and first-person shooter mechanics as well as its distinctive presentation and excellent music, so I was actually quite interested to try the second game, and purchased a copy without a second thought.

Then the game was released, and I decided to take a peep at the Steam Community page to see what the rest of the world thought of it.

Big mistake.

It seems that Sanctum 2 is the latest victim of elitist players expecting one thing from a game and getting something slightly different, then throwing all their toys out of the pram, demanding refunds and hurling abuse at the developers. Because Sanctum 2 is not the same game as the original Sanctum, it seems, it is worthy of scorn and vilification. Because Sanctum 2 incorporates a number of features that not only make it workable on console — it's also being released on Xbox Live Arcade — but change the game balance significantly from the original, apparently it is worthy of review-bombing on Metacritic and endless, endless whining on forums.

You know what, though? I've played a good 4 or 5 hours of Sanctum 2 today in total, and it's great. It isn't the original game, no, but why would you want it to be? Sanctum is still available for download, so if you like that, go play that. Sanctum 2 is a distinctive experience that, while in possession of a couple of strange design decisions, is a lot of fun to play both solo and cooperatively with other people. It is both strategic and action-packed; challenging and fun; and it offers a significantly greater amount of content and depth than the original game did when it came out of the gates.

The complainers' biggest issues with the new game seem to be the fact that resources to build towers are now delivered as "drops" that have to be picked up manually, and that there is a hard limit of ten towers per level. The "drop" system means that everyone playing has to either agree on who is going to be in charge of building what — or charge off and race to be the first to pick up the resources. If you're playing with friends or people with whom you can communicate well, no problem. If you're playing with griefers and trolls, potential problem, but not insurmountable. (For what it's worth, I always prefer playing cooperative games with people I actually know anyway, and I'm sure I'm not the only one — and as such I probably won't run into this problem personally.)

The ten-tower limit also simply isn't an issue in practical terms. I am yet to hit said limit, because plonking down "tower base" blocks to create a maze to hold up enemies does not count towards this limit, and the limited quantity of resources on hand means that it's only really practical to build a few towers per level anyway — you have to support your towers with your own gunplay in order to succeed. It's a true hybrid, in other words; you can't win without your towers, and your towers can't win without you.

Some complainers have also whinged about the fact that you supposedly can't make complex mazes in this new game. To those people, I would invite them to have a go at the level Mark and I were playing before we wrapped up for the evening, in which we were defending two cores simultaneously from assault, and built impressive mazes on both sides of the level in order to keep the enemies away from our precious charges as long as possible. Careful tower placement and resource management was a must, and the nature of many of the enemies that came along made it necessary to cooperate, communicate and use skill and tactics to take them down rather than simply firing blindly at anything moving.

In short, Sanctum 2 is a very good game if you enjoy both first-person shooters and tower defense games that demand a slightly heavier degree of thought and strategy than normal. It's an excellent fusion of two fairly disparate game genres, and while there are a few things that could be tweaked here and there, it's perfectly enjoyable as it is. Not only that, Coffee Stain Studios have demonstrated that they are open to constructive feedback, too, and will likely continue to improve the game after its release. Given the abuse and vitriol that has been hurled their way today, they would be perfectly within their rights to just say "fuck you" to all the ungrateful gamers who are bitching about their new release, to be honest, so I have to admire them for their self-restraint in dealing with these people.

It is, essentially, yet another case of a not-insignificant number of people suffering under the assumption that Their Way is the Right Way, and that anyone who disagrees with them is somehow an awful person. These people preferred the original Sanctum to its sequel and that's absolutely fine; their behaviour towards Coffee Stain Studios and anyone who has expressed a liking for the new game is not.

1213: Another Board Game Post

Today we had another little jaunt into Toronto. Our original intention was to have a wander around Kensington Market, but by the time we got there it was so hot and sunny that it was getting not-particularly-pleasant to wander around outside, so we decided to repair to Snakes & Lattes to sit in the relative cool, play some board games and wait to meet Mark and Lynette later that afternoon.

Andie and I hit a few old favourites while we waited, including Carcassonne (which I won), Ticket to Ride: Nordic Countries (which I did not win), and Blokus (which I did win). Then other people showed up, including our mutual friend Jon, who introduced us to a few interesting games I hadn't come across before.

The first of these was Fist of Dragonstones. I'd heard of this before but wasn't really familiar with it, so it was essentially new to me.

Fist of Dragonstones is a bidding game in which you're trying to be the first player to score three victory points. This might not sound like a lot, but it's not especially easy to come by points. Most of the game revolves around bidding various amounts of in-game currency (the exact amount of which you have is kept secret from the other players) in a "closed-fist" bid to acquire character cards with various special abilities. These range from dragons, which provide you with coloured dragonstones, to wizards and magicians, who help you score points from various combinations of dragonstones. Certain cards allow you to mess with the other players or hinder their efforts, but your access to the cards is limited by what money you have on hand — and there's nowhere near enough for you to be able to bid on everything.

It's an interesting game that I feel probably takes a few goes to "get" but it proved enjoyable. The dragonstones themselves are sparkly and shiny, too.

—

The "main event" for the afternoon was a game I've been curious about for a while: A Touch of Evil. This game had been sold to me as being "like Arkham Horror but a fraction of the length and a fraction of the complexity". Since I like Arkham Horror but it rarely hits the table due to the sheer amount of time it takes to play it to completion, I was very curious to try this theme-heavy game that sees you fighting various evil masterminds in Colonial America.

A Touch of Evil is indeed quite like Arkham Horror in many respects in that it encourages players to contemplate the narrative of their characters' actions rather than just following the game mechanics in a rather dry manner. There's no requirement to "role-play" or anything, but a considerable amount of enjoyment is added to the experience if you imagine or describe what the characters are getting up to and attempt to contextualise their dice rolls and skill checks.

It's also interesting in that, unlike Arkham Horror, it doesn't have to be played as a purely cooperative game. It can instead be played as a co-op-competitive game in which players split into teams to see who can be the first to take down whatever Great Evil is threatening the world this time around, or even as a "free for all" game in which all players are working individually to be the first to take down whatever Great Evil is threatening the world this time around.

There are a bunch of interesting little mechanics in A Touch of Evil that make it enjoyable, and heavily thematic. For example, the game's setting features a band of "elders" who can potentially be recruited to help out in the game's final confrontation. However, each elder has their own secret, represented by a card played under their character card. These secrets range from minor misdemeanours which don't affect the gameplay but which add some flavour to their character to the potential for them to be in league with the Great Evil — or even to be the Great Evil in disguise themselves! There's a lot of scope for surprises and hilarity, and the game never really felt like it was dragging — by the time Arkham Horror is starting to get tiresome, at least one player in A Touch of Evil is probably ready to trigger the showdown against the scenario's boss.

—

I took advantage of Snakes & Lattes' excellent prices before I left and picked up copies of Flash Point and Guild Hall to add to the copies of Smash Up and Zombie Dice I acquired the other day. Andie also bought me a copy of King of Tokyo as a belated birthday present, and I grabbed a copy of Race for the Galaxy on behalf of one of my regular board game buddies back home. I'm looking forward to trying all these games out when I get back — we have a "gaming weekend" lined up at the end of the month, so that should be a lot of fun.

Not sure what we're doing tomorrow as yet. It's possible we might have another quiet day, then we'll probably hit Toronto Zoo on our last full day here on Friday. We fly back on Saturday. It'll be sad to leave after the enjoyable time we've had here, but it'll also be nice to get back to relative "normality". I miss our rats!

1212: The Meme-Ing of Life

We went out to Toronto's apparently-famous comedy club The Second City tonight to see a sketch/improv show called The Meme-Ing of Life. And what do you know? It was pretty great.

I'm a fan of sketch comedy, and have been since the days of The Fast Show and Big Train. One of my favourite shows that I've seen live at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in years gone by was a sketch/improv show, too — performed by Amsterdam outfit Boom Chicago. I particularly enjoyed tonight's show because it reminded me, to a certain degree, of Boom Chicago's shows that I've seen in the past — and that is most certainly a very good thing indeed.

The Meme-Ing of Life was an interesting show for a number of reasons, perhaps chiefly for what it wasn't. The name and posters implied that this would be a show heavily inspired by Internet memes, which gave me some degree of trepidation going into it. A two-hour show in which people who think they're funny simply regurgitate things they've seen on Reddit recently would be pretty cringeworthy, I'm sure we can all agree — there are certain things about Internet humour that make it best viewed in its native environment rather than bringing it into meatspace.

Fortunately, however, the cast didn't take this route. Rather than directly referencing memes, the show consisted of a series of sketches that were loosely inspired or which made oblique references to things which had been Kind of a Big Deal on the Internet at various points in the past. For example, one sketch featured a band of cheerleaders spewing out increasingly-inappropriate sexual chants on the subject of "legitimate rape", abortion et al, while "Coach," an "old white man who knows what's best for us" gets increasingly irate. This is, obviously, a reference to a number of things — the famously-heated discussions over whether or not you can make the word "rape" funny (hey! You can!) and the U.S. politician (I forget who) who made the ill-advised comments about "legitimate rape" a while back.

It wasn't all politically-charged stuff, though, and not all of it wore its inspirations on its sleeve. Two of the best sketches in the show featured no words whatsoever — one was a wonderful mime/dance number accompanied by music in which a man and a woman did the "dance" that will be familiar to anyone who has ever ridden public transit in their life as the man attempted to get the woman to move her bag off the seat; the other was a fantastic mime scene in which two rival basketball players performed increasingly-ridiculous shots.

The overall theme of the show was "making a little difference", and this was returned to a number of times throughout the course of the evening through a number of touching little interludes. In one, a member of the audience was "picked on" and it looked as if he was going to be the butt of a few gags, but it actually turned out the cast were just buying him a drink. In another, the same thing happened, but this time the "unfortunate" audience member was rewarded with a pre-loaded Starbucks card. And in the last, an audience member was quizzed on what she would do if she had a bit of money to spare and then rewarded with an improvised song about her desires which unfolded while a bucket was passed around the audience for everyone to sling some spare change into — once the song was over, she was just given the money.

To say too much about the show would be to spoil it significantly, but it provoked a number of genuine laughs very regularly. I'm always impressed by the quick wit of people who are good at semi-improvised sketch comedy, and this show certainly did not disappoint in that regard. In fact, just to prove that they were serious about what they do, the cast returned after the main show had ended and performed an extra, completely improvised routine based on an audience prompt word. It was something quite special to see.

1211: I Want A Place Like This

Toronto is in possession of an establishment that I very much wish was a more widespread "Thing", particularly in the U.K. Said establishment is known as Snakes & Lattes, and you can probably guess from its name what sort of place it is.

Or perhaps you can't, since it's sort of an unusual establishment.

Snakes & Lattes is a board game cafe. That is to say, it's a cafe in which the playing of board games is not only welcomed, it is actively encouraged. How, you ask? By the fact it has an impressively huge selection just sitting there on its back wall waiting to be played with, ranging from well-thumbed copies of popular card games to the hardest of the hardcore Eurogames and everything in between. It costs just $5 (plus food and drink) to hang out there for as long as you like, and that price gives you access to the establishment's impressive collection of titles as you please.

Snakes, as it tends to be known, is not just a place to go and play board games, though. It's also a great place to go and learn new board games. The staff on hand are all ready, willing and able to recommend new titles to you, and even to teach you how to play. If you're looking for a particular kind of game and you're not sure what to try, chances are someone at Snakes will be able to recommend it to you.

The other thing that Snakes is is a place to buy board games. A healthy proportion of the games that it has available for play are also available for purchase at the front of the establishment, and for very reasonable prices, too — I picked up a couple of games myself today on the recommendation of a Snakes staffer. Specifically, I grabbed a copy of Zombie Dice, which is a very simple game I've heard a few people recommend recently, and a copy of Smash Up, a very entertaining and chaotic card game that rewards being a complete dick to your opponents — I'm looking forward to introducing this one to my friends back home.

I'm certainly going to be taking at least one more trip back to Snakes before our holiday is over, since there are a number of games I've had a chance to try that I'd like to take back with me. Specifically, King of Tokyo and Flash Point are two that intrigued me a great deal — King of Tokyo for being an excellent, fun and quick game with simple but enjoyable mechanics, and Flash Point for being a great cooperative game with enough differences from Pandemic — and a similarly short play time — to be worth a look. There are also a bunch of small games that I'm keen to introduce to my friends back home, too — stuff like the color-matching card game Coloretto and the thoroughly silly Ghost Blitz and Anomia, but I haven't decided which of these, if any, I'm going to pick up my own copy of. I did also try and snag a copy of Love Letter to take home, but that game appears to be like gold dust at present.

Anyway. No idea what's on the cards for tomorrow daytime, but I believe we're going out to a comedy club tomorrow evening to see an entertaining-sounding improv and sketch show on the subject of Internet memes. There's a subject that could easily be cringeworthy, but the comedy club in question is apparently rather highly regarded in the area, and thus I'm looking forward to it quite a bit. Doubtless I will be splurging my thoughts on the matter over these pages tomorrow evening, so look forward to that then.

For now, good night!

1210: Reppin' the Squad

Those of you who know me well will probably know that Mark and Lynette, the people Andie and I are staying with on our vacation in Toronto, are members of the Squadron of Shame. The Squad is, of course, a ragtag group of gamers who came together back in the heyday of 1up.com to champion the underdogs of the games industry, and we've been doing an admirable job of that ever since through a combination of online discussion, podcasting and playing games together.

One of the reasons I've been enjoying this vacation so much is because as well as getting out and about a bit to see some of the city — something we'll be doing a lot more of in the coming week — I've had the chance to hang out with people who have very similar tastes in games to me; people who understand why JRPGs and visual novels are awesome, and why a middling-to-low Metacritic rating isn't necessarily something that should put you off playing a game if you like the look of it.

In the last week or so, we've been repping the Squad pretty well between the games we've been playing. Mark has been playing a lot of Fire Emblem on 3DS, of course, since he's been glued to it since it was released back in February, but we've been exploring some other interesting games together, too. As I type this, we're enjoying the distinctly Canadian flavour of Sang-Froid: Tales of Werewolves, a very strange game that combines elements of tower defense, strategy games, role-playing games, action games and survival horror to create something quite unlike anything any of us have ever seen before. Meanwhile, I've completed three playthroughs each of Long Live the Queen and Spirited Heart, two extremely interesting if somewhat unpolished "life sims" in which you build up stats in an attempt to complete various tasks and/or romance any of the in-game eligible bachelors and/or bachelorettes.

Sang-Froid (above) is an interesting game. At the outset, it looks like a rather ordinary third-person action game with a distinctive aesthetic, but as the levels progress it grows in complexity a bit at a time until — I assume, anyway; we haven't got that far yet — the game you're playing at the end of the story is virtually unrecognisable from the hack-and-slash it appeared to be at the very beginning. I haven't played it myself yet, but it looks like a challenging game with a huge amount of depth. The two different playable characters allow you to enjoy the game in two distinctive styles, too — one has better combat skills, making the action sequences easier, while the other is weaker, meaning that the strategic sequence where you lay traps and build structures is considerably more important to get right before the hordes of darkness come running.

But I digress. Allow me to talk about the games I have been playing personally.

I've already talked about both Long Live the Queen (above) and Spirited Heart (below) in two previous posts, but they both bear mentioning again, I think. Both games are examples of the "life sim" genre — a style of game which is rarely explored outside of low-budget indie games. I guess you could count The Sims as a life sim, but it's not quite the same thing — The Sims is a detailed simulation of social interactions and other related business, but both Long Live the Queen and Spirited Heart are more like role-playing games in which you're not travelling the world in order to save humanity, but instead trying to eke out the best possible existence for your (female) protagonist.

Both Long Live the Queen and Spirited Heart differ considerably, however, despite having fundamentally similar mechanics. Long Live the Queen sees you playing a predefined character — the titular Queen — and then sending her down the path of your choice, while Spirited Heart allows you a lot more freedom to design your own character and choose what your goals are, be they romancing a specific character or attempting to accomplish a mission set for you by your race's goddess. While neither of these games are particularly shiny or exciting to look at, I've found them surprisingly compelling, and they make me want to check out more games of a similar ilk.

One reason I've been enjoying them a lot is due to their similarity to an old favourite visual novel/dating sim known as True Love (above). I first played this back in probably 1999-2000 and still think of it very fondly today, despite the fact it is an absolute bugger to get running on modern machines. Like the life sims I've been playing recently, True Love saw you managing your time carefully in an attempt to build up your stats enough to attract one or more of the game's heroines and make her your "true love". I attribute my present-day love of games like the Persona series to my earlier experiences with True Love, and I'm getting a lot of the same feelings from titles like Long Live the Queen and Spirited Heart, too, which is nice.

The other interesting thing about them is that these are games obviously designed with a primarily female audience in mind, and that in the case of Spirited Heart at least, they're gay/bisexual positive. Long Live the Queen doesn't have a strong romance component, whereas it's a key focus of Spirited Heart. In Spirited Heart, you even have the option to turn the girl-boy and girl-girl romances on or off independently of one another — in fact, it's sold as two separate "games" that bolt on to each other, so if you want to play an all-yuri life sim, simply pick up the Girl's Love version by itself and go nuts.

And the one final reason I'm mentioning these games is that there doesn't seem to be an awful lot of discussion about them online generally. I'm a strong believer that great games should be celebrated and appreciated as much as possible, regardless of their budget or where they hail from, and thus, well, I'm doing my bit.

You can grab Long Live the Queen from Hanako Games' website, Spirited Heart from Winter Wolves' website, and Sang-Froid from Steam.

1209: Further Adventures in Fudz

As I noted the other day, one of the fun things about our trip to Toronto is that we've had the opportunity to sample some of the city's more colourful eating establishments. Mark and Lynette both know the places that Torontonians (I bet they hate being called that) visit on a regular basis rather than the inevitably much more expensive touristy places in touristy areas. Consequently, we've had the opportunity to eat well for relatively reasonable prices — Mark and Lynette refer to a $20 bill as a "yuppie food stamp" and it's easy to see why, since the vast majority of meals we've had while we've been here have come out somewhere in the region of $20 each.

We've had a lot of Asian cuisine of various descriptions since we've been here, as I noted the other day. Today I added to the range of Asian foods that I've experienced by having a taste of okonomiyaki. I had no idea whatsoever what okonomiyaki was prior to today, but I had at least heart of it — the character Kirari in the visual novel Kira Kira (which is eminently worth your time, by the way) is obsessed with it.

I was half expecting okonomiyaki to be something similar to takoyaki — the small fried rice flour balls filled with octopus meat and other goo, then drizzled with Japanese mayonnaise. Okonomiyaki is, as it turns out, absolutely nothing like takoyaki. No; rather than being small bite-sized thingies like takoyaki, okonomiyaki is instead somewhat akin to a cross between a potato cake and an omelette, with lashings of a rich barbecue sauce-style substance slathered all over the top of it. I forget exactly what the omelette-type-thing was made from and am far too tired to actually research it at this hour in the morning, but it was quite tasty. Like an omelette, it could also be made with a variety of different fillings, ranging from beef to shrimp or squid. I had a squid one to make up for the fact I didn't have a squid taco at Banh Mi Boys the other day, so I now feel suitably guilty about devouring some of Ika Musume's relatives.

I wasn't quite sure what I was going to make of okonomiyaki, as I was aware going into it that it was made with onions, which those who know me well will know are a vegetable I despise with a great passion. (I had terrible trouble growing up convincing my parents that I really genuinely didn't like onions, despite actually retching at the dinner table when I could taste them on several occasions; the fact that being able to taste onion today still makes me retch makes me feel somewhat vindicated that I wasn't just being an awkward child about them.) Fortunately, however, the onions were shredded up to such a degree (not to mention having had the shit fried out of them) that they were inoffensive to my palate's delicate sensibilities, and consequently there was no retching.

Actually, I enjoyed the okonomiyaki very much. I'm pleased I tried it; I'm not sure it's my favourite of all the Japanese food I've tried to date, but I am happy that I've tasted it and now know what to expect should I find myself ordering it again.

Now all we have to do is complete the "Japanese trifecta" by having sushi one night this week and we'll be all Asianed out.

1208: Spirited Heart

Inspired by my recent excursion into Hanako Games' Long Live The Queen, I decided to check out another "life sim" game that has been sitting in my virtual pile of shame for some time, ever since I picked up a "Manga Bundle" from Hanako and Winter Wolves a while back. Spirited Heart is a very similar sort of game to Long Live The Queen, only instead of playing as a princess-slash-queen-to-be, you're playing a "normal" person in a fantasy world. Specifically, you're playing as an 18-year old human, elf or demon woman coming to "the big city" for the first time and trying to "make it" before she turns 30. Just like real life, then.

Spirited Heart does a number of interesting things that distinguishes it from Long Live The Queen. Chief among these is the fact that you're not playing a fixed character — you're playing one of your own design, to a certain extent anyway. There isn't any option to customise your character's appearance, for example, but the way you play does determine what sort of person your character ends up as.

This starts right from the beginning of the game. Choosing a race sets your initial basic statistics, and you can then tweak this starting set of abilities by "role-playing" a few simple scenarios with multiple-choice questions. By the time you've answered these basic questions about your character's childhood and adolescence, you have a good idea of who they are and what kind of person they can be, and can start working on their statistics further.

The way the game works is that each week, you choose whether your character goes to work or takes a week off. Going to work allows you to choose any occupations you meet the prerequisite stat requirements for, while resting allows you to restore your health and morale, which can often be negatively impacted both by going to work and through random events that occur. You can't go to work if you're too unhealthy or if your morale is too low, so sometimes you need to take a week off in order to progress. Working, meanwhile, often improves your stats and allows you to earn money, which can be used on more effective vacations when required.

Occasionally during your work day, you'll have "random encounters" with the game's other characters. These visual novel-style scenes see your character interacting with these other potential love interests — both male and female (assuming you've bought both the basic heterosexual game and the standalone Girl's Love expansion) — and occasionally offer you a choice to advance your relationship.

This is probably the most interesting thing about the game: the emergent narrative created through the stat-building gameplay combines with the prescripted narrative of the visual novel-style romance scenes to create something that is much more than the sum of its parts. For example, in the game I'm currently playing, my character is a strong young woman who grew up on a farm and thus doesn't have a lot in the way of social graces. In her career so far, she has worked as a farmer and a builder. In the latter case, she encountered a young and somewhat clumsy elf noble whom it transpired she was building a house for. Somewhat later, after improving her skills enough to become a maid in a noble house, she ran into this elf maiden once again and discovered that she was betrothed to a fat, unattractive nobleman who obviously didn't give a shit about her. And thus we're into a pleasing "star-crossed lovers" sort of situation as my commoner character attempts to prove herself worthy to this noble elf maiden and her family. I don't yet know how that ends yet, but I'm curious to see.

Just to confuse matters, partway through the game, my character was visited by her Goddess and tasked with attaining a particular "title" by the time she reaches the age of 30. Unfortunately, pursuing the elf of her dreams and following the Goddess' quest are not really compatible, since the Goddess' quest requires me to become an Artist, while pursuing the elf requires me to continue working as her maid. CHOICES. DECISIONS. CONSEQUENCES.

Like Long Live The Queen, Spirited Heart is a fairly no-frills production with minimal graphics, animation and sound, but like Long Live The Queen, it's also a surprisingly compelling game if you take it in the spirit in which it is intended. It's a role-playing game in which you're not battling monsters or going on epic quests; you're living a (relatively) normal life in a fantasy world and trying to make the best of your situation. It's an interesting little game, and one which I see myself playing through a few times.

Find out more here.

1207 Part 2: Food Travels

Here's a full update to make up for the pitiful effort last night. Apologies for that, but I was in far too much pain to even contemplate writing more than a couple of sentences at the time. I was even sick. You really wanted to know that, didn't you? Of course you did. BLAAAARGH.

Anyway, what I actually wanted to talk about in last night's post was one of my favourite aspects of travel: food. I'm not necessarily talking about sampling local cuisine — which here in Toronto would probably be poutine, I guess — but wandering around and having a chance to sample some local eateries, and eat some interesting food that you might not be able to get back home.

Toronto is particularly good for Asian eateries of various descriptions. Yesterday we sampled two of them: the Banh Mi Boys sandwich shop, and Kinton Ramen.

Banh Mi Boys is a pokey little shop that often has queues extending out of the door. They serve a variety of Vietnamese-inspired food that includes Asian-style tacos — floppy rather than crispy — and steamed rice flour buns known as bao. They also do Vietnamese-style baguettes, the titular banh mi, which are a decent meal in themselves. We tried the tacos and the bao, both of which were delicious. I had pulled pork in my bao and some sort of spicy beef in my taco — there were several different options on offer besides these, including squid tacos, which I sort of regret I didn't try now, even if eating them would make me feel a bit guilty towards Ika Musume-chan.

Kinton Ramen, meanwhile, is fairly self-explanatory. It's a ramen shop. All they do is ramen and a few side dishes. They do do several different types of ramen, to be fair, but if you don't want ramen this is probably not the place to come. I must confess to not being overly familiar with ramen, as it's something we don't seem to get all that much of back in the U.K., but the couple of occasions I have had it in the past have been thoroughly enjoyable.

For those unfamiliar with Japanese cuisine, eating "ramen" generally involves getting an enormous bowl full of broth made from pork bones (with the amount of fat used in it determining how "rich" it is) which is then filled with ramen noodles, vegetables such as beansprouts, nori and various other bits and pieces, and typically topped with a lump of pork. Some also have a whole egg in them — sometimes this is served chopped, but at Kinton, there's just a whole egg dropped in it, which is quite amusing. You then proceed to consume the whole bowl using a combination of chopsticks and a wooden Japanese soup spoon. At Kinton, they take your photo if you finish the whole thing, which is actually quite an achievement — there's a lot of food there, and due to the way it's structured, it often looks like you're not making any progress with it for a very long time. Like the Persona 4 beef bowl, if you will.

Anyway, that should hopefully make up for last night. And hopefully my headache will fuck off and die now.

1207: Ow ow ow ow

Sorry for the brief post. My blogging ability is currently impaired by possibly the worst headache I think I've ever endured. Normal business will resume tomorrow.

1206: My Holiday, by Pete, Age 32

I am still on holiday, or "vacation" as you crazy Americans call it, and I'm having a great time. A significant proportion of this can be attributed to our gracious hosts Mark and Lynette, whom I've been looking forward to coming to visit again for the past several years. It's a bummer not living near the vast majority of my friends, most of whom live in various parts of North America and a few of whom live even further afield than that. This means that the opportunity to actually spend some time with people who mean a lot to me is something that I will seize whenever possible.

The other part of the reason I'm having a great time is simply the fact that I'm on holiday with absolutely no commitments or worries right now. It's a thoroughly pleasant feeling to be in a position where I know I can just enjoy myself without having to think about getting work done, or live up to any responsibilities, or anything like that. It's a feeling I haven't had for quite some time, so I'm taking full advantage of the opportunity while I can.

Today has been a lazy day. Andie has been feeling a little under the weather as a side-effect of being a bit ill shortly before we left, so we took it easy for the day. Most of our time has been spent sitting around playing video games, watching TV and generally just hanging out. Some people may think it's a waste to come three and a half thousand miles to do things that I'd do at home anyway, but combine the opportunity to relax without responsibilities with the chance to hang out with friends I literally haven't seen face-to-face for years — despite talking to them most days thanks to the Intertubes — and that sounds like a thoroughly good time to me.

I'm a very easy guest. Provide me with a couch to sit on, something to look at and occasionally someone to talk to and I'm happy. I never feel obliged to be doing stuff constantly, unlike many other people I know. (That's not a passive-aggressive thing — it's simply the fact I know different people like to holiday in different ways.) I'm very happy just sitting around relaxing and doing things I enjoy with people I like rather than always being on the go, trying to cram as many "sights" into a short period of time as possible. To me, that way lies madness; I go on holiday to chill out and relax, not to be stressed out trying to mark things off on an imaginary, arbitrary checklist.

Basically, all is well in the world, and the holiday period is progressing pleasingly slowly. By the time I return, I should be ready to face whatever the future has in store for me.