OMFuckinG! Nintendo Announcement! Pokemon Gold and Silver Remakes! OMFuckinG!!

As I type this I am happier than I could ever admit to people not on the internet. This is one of the best days of my life! Nintendo have announced that they are remaking Pokemon Gold and Silver for the DS. The remakes will be called Pokemon HeartGold and Pokemon SoulSilver. It's all confirmed, it's on the official website. It's actually happening! The dream has become real!

Look at the title graphics:

Isn't it beautiful? I'm so happy I'm genuinely on the verge of tears! This is one of the best things that has ever happened! I CAN'T STOP USING EXCLAMATION MARKS!!

Pokemon HeartGold and SoulSilver are due for release in November this year in Japan. The US version will likely be released in mid 2010, with the European version coming whenever they remember the European market still exists. But we'll all be importing the Japanese versions and then importing the US versions and then completing them both and then framing the boxes before we even start thinking about the European release, right? I mean, we all will. Won't we?

I'm inviting all my friends out tonight to drink like there's no tomorrow. This is the Best Day Ever.

"We Won't Diagnose You With Swine Flu If You Might Have It"

As my slow return to lucidity continues, it looks like everyone else is going the opposite way. My WTF-Moment of the Day happened when I read this article in the Mainichi. You remember how Japan was getting ready to fight the swine-flu virus by setting up hundreds of emergency clinics and heat-scanning people and encouraging everyone to wear thin, permeable bits of cotton over their faces? Of course you do, that was in the news yesterday - your brain only needs 24 hours of storage space to remember that.

Mr. Porky's foil-sealed Bag of DEATH
Well today it's being reported that people with any kind of fever are being turned away by doctors and hospitals. They've also refused medical-examinations to people who mention that they have a foreign friend. The potential infected are being sent to public health centres (which are not actually equipped to test for the H1N1 virus), or just having doors slammed in their faces amidst shrieks of "Unclean! Unclean!".

So on the one hand they've set up more facilities for treating the virus than anywhere else in the world, but on the other hand they're refusing to send the possibly-infected to places that might be equipped to deal with them. There's a paradox here somewhere, I know there is. I can smell it.


Bird Flu and Swine Flu collide... with hilarious results

Swine Flu Over The Cuckoo's Nest

I haven't been writing much in the way of Japanese news lately, but that's only because I haven't been reading any. But I've started again out of an illness-induced lack of things to do.

I guess the most important news over the past week has been swine flu, right? So far I've managed to avoid caring about it, as I have with everything the Central British Media Brain has churned out as a scandal or triumph in the past five years. But then I got ill, and suddenly it became very interesting indeed. Obviously I don't have swine-flu, just the unfashionable and unglamorous regular flu, but it seems like whenever anyone sneezes these days everyone dives for cover "just in case". The Japanese have a great tradition of wearing a face-mask if they're ill (so they don't spread it to others) or if there's a bug going round, a purely speculative and useless precaution that's more a gesture of social-consciousness or panic than a viable preventative measure. Of course, there's always a bug going round, that's just how the world works. Somewhere, someone you know is ill, and that'll never change. Unfortunately, this time it's me.

But anyway. I'm rambling now. That'll probably be the flu. Japan is currently on "high-alert" for this swine-flu thing, and have created 684 emergency clinics to deal with it. 684 clinics, all with absolutely nothing to do, because there hasn't actually been an outbreak of swine-flu in Japan yet. 684 clinics, all with nothing to do but work themselves into a frothing panic.

They've also started running heat-scans over arrivals at Japan's airports to see if anyone has a fever. And absurdly, people are worried that they're not prepared enough. The world really has gone stone-cold crazy.

This is why I hardly read the news any more. I'll be back tomorrow with some jokes. If I'm still alive.

"Death! Death and Pestilence upon ye!"

Time-Lapse Tokyo

Some time-lapse footage of Shinjuku was recently posted on TokyoMango, so I got to tracking down other time-lapse footage of Tokyo. The most interesting ones are obviously the ones which retrack a number of years into a number of seconds. This video shows the construction of a few skyscrapers over the course of two years in Roppongi:

Pretty cool, right? But this next video is a little more ambitious - it retracks 35 years into 10 seconds. Every year from July 1969 to July 2004 a picture was taken of the skyline over Shinjuku and then strung together by a tv show:


This next clip shows time-lapse footage of roads:


And finally this is the awesome video that made me spend a half hour looking at sped-up home-movies:

OMFuckinG New Pokemon Game Announcement Is Imminent!

Aaaaaaahh! Aaaaaaaah! A new Pokemon game! A new Pokemon game! AAAaaaaaaaahh!!

According to Bulbapedia:

Several media outlets have revealed that the announcement of a major, popularly-discussed Pokémon game will be made later this month. Pokémon Sunday is set to reveal the title May 10.

Issues of CoroCoro and Nintendo Dream will be published the day after the announcement with screaming headlines and about the "much-talked-about big title".

Bulbapedia reasons that since Nintendo have said that the new game has been the centre of speculation, this means they're probably referring to the Pokemon Gold and Pokemon Silver remakes that the whole fanbase is collectively trying to will into existence. The reasons for expecting a remake of those two games are numerous. They are so numerous, in fact, that it would take a Pokemon fan with psychotic-level obsession and a flagrant disregard of his readership to list them all on his blog. So here they are:

1. Pokemon Red and Pokemon Blue were remade in Generation III, setting a precedent for remaking games two generations before after the new generation games have been released.
2. The Generation IV games are set in the same time span as Gold and Silver, just as Gen III was in the same time span as Red and Blue.
3. The red Gyarados from the Lake of Rage is mentioned on the news in Sinnoh.
4. The Olivine Gym Leader, Jasmine, has a cameo in Sunnyshore City.
5. Professor Elm's Pokemon egg studies are mentioned.
6. Cynthia gives the player a Secret Potion in Gen IV, just like the Secret Potion needed to cure the Ampharos in the Olivine lighthouse. The in-bag description also mentions Cianwood City.
7. Bebe talks about a "friend from Johto", who gave her an Eevee, and sounds a lot like Bill.
8. The guy in the Hotel Grand Lake talks about locations in Johto, namely the Tin Tower and Whirl Islands.
9. The Veilstone City Department Store has Ragecandybars, but they're always listed as "sold out".
10. In the game data, possible locations for non-Sinnoh Pokemon are Kanto, Hoenn, and Johto.
11. In the Diamond/Pearl series of the anime, every major character has obtained at least one Gen II Pokemon.
12. One of the promotion Pokemon for the new movie is a unique Pichu, who was also used as a promotion for Gold and Silver.
13. The new movie also features all three Johto starter-Pokemon.
14. Trademarked names include Pokemon DuskGold and Pokemon DawnSilver (which might correspond to the Dawn and Dusk Stones in the Gen IV games), and also Pokemon WhiteGold and Pokemon MoonStone (and Nintendo also own the rights to www.pokemonwhitegold.com).

But anyway. We'll see come the 10th, right? I'm very excited. Pokemon Gold being my third favourite video game ever, if remakes are announced on the 10th I may very well cry with joy.

Please please please, Nintendo. Please.

Oricon Survey Aggregate List

Disengage Laziness Protocol! OTN is back! I've not been blogging for a week due to a nexus of life setbacks including multiple deadlines, a broken internet service, illness, and a predisposition towards sleeping a lot. But now that's all over so we can get back on track. What was I almost definitely talking about? Oh yes, Ueto Aya.

So I've been doing some research on recent Oricon surveys, through the brilliant Tokyograph. And I've come to the conclusion that Aya isn't quite as popular as she used to be. In the "Ideal Younger Sister" survey she came fourth (Becky came first), in the "Ideal New Co-worker" category she came second (Becky came first), and in the "Ideal Type Of Daughter" survey she came fourth again (Becky came first). Seriously, what the hell? I'm a fan of Becky, obv - who isn't? But she's no Ueto Aya.

The surveys kind of puzzle me. It would be interesting to see what kind of criteria the public are using which makes them think Aya would be twice as good as a new co-worker as she is a daughter or younger sister.

I also looked at the "Who Do You Want To Marry?" survey, in which Aya came second, and the "Who Do You Want As Your Lover?" survey, in which she came first (YES!). Funny how those two surveys aren't the same, eh? It seems the average man wants to marry Ayase Haruka, whilst sleeping with Ueto Aya. Anyway, I then aggregated the positions of the celebrities in each survey using a rudimentary point system (a technique carried over from too much time spent on Fantasy Baseball games), and got the following Top 5 Most Popular Female Celebrities:

1. Ueto Aya (37 points)
2. Becky (30 points)
3. Aragaki Yui (25 points)
4. Nagasawa Masami (22 points)
5= Ayase Haruka (18 points)
5= Horikita Maki (18 points)

So there you go. Rudimentary statistics crunched from laughably small sample data don't lie. Ueto Aya is officially the most popular female celebrity in Japan.