Darlo's World

After watching an episode of ‘Are You Smarter Than a 10 Year Old’ on Sky One the other day, I thought I’d have a go at the online version just to see how I’d do. Admitadly up until today I’d not managed to complete the entire quiz, always falling at the final question where they throw a history or natural science question my way.

Well anyway, when I was playing I noticed something odd on one of the questions; a spelling mistake. Ironically a game to test whether you’re smarter than someone only a decade old had it’s only mental problems.

The question presented to me was “Near WHIOH of these would you find a lighthouse?”, and I could only presume that they intended to use the word ‘which’. The main thing that stumped me is if you have a look down at your keyboard, where is the ‘O’ key in relation to the ‘C’ key? Sadly enough I “hit the wrong button” and got the question wrong.

I had another moment of ‘eh?’ last night when I was flicking through one of my Japanese grammar books. Oxford Japanese Grammar and Verbs by Jonathan Bunt was recommended to me by a friend and to be honest it’s a very good little book. It’s explanations are clear and easy to follow. However it seems that even the Oxford University Press has it’s off days.

授業が早く終わったら電話電話します
Jugyō ga hayaku owattara denwa shimasu
If the class finishes early, I will ring

For those who don’t do Japanese you might want to just skip on ahead. For those that do, have a look at ‘電話電話’ which is apparently read as just ‘denwa’. If you have the book and want to have a nose it’s on page 134.

It took a little bit of thinking about how I’d word this blog entry to avoid it being chopped up by Cyber Patrol, Net Nanny and various other blockers … not to mention possible knocks on the door from the police. So here we go, wish me luck.

A couple of days ago a friend and I decided to buy PSPs. After spotting a few of the “2000 model” (why they add three zeros instead of making it the “2 model” is beyond me) at a bargain price we also did a little hunting for some cheap games and UMD films to accompany them. From one shop I spotted (and bought) 2 UMDs at 350 yen each (£2.43) which looked to be very crappy films (I didn’t try and read the descriptions, I just saw cheap and crappy).

From Here To Reality starring Risa Goto is a 55 minute tease-fest in which she walks, swims and dawdles around in various outfits (the swimming is topless), but the viewer doesn’t get to “see anything”. Definately one of those “get what you pay for moments”, and was good for a quick giggle, but not really good enough for a laugh. I’d just like to point out that in 2005, when this was made, Risa was 21 years old. Which brings me onto the next one.

Those familiar with dating sims will know that the objective is to follow a string of tasks, quests, questions or whatever, with the eventual aim of getting with a girl (depending on the age rating of the game this aim could just be going steady with her, or something more series). Likewise games have been made with different genders in mind. Well as it turns out that’s just what Sweet Paradise was.

You take one of three young girls out for a date somewhere in beautiful Bali. When I say young, the first couple of goes of it I thought that they were still above that “barely legal” age limit, but it turns out I was wrong. After nosing google it happens to be that the 2006 game/video stars 14 year old Runa (now 17), 12 year old Saaya (now 15) and also 12 year old Jessica (also now 15). From the couple of goes I had it seems the dates end in one of two ways; you either agree what good friends you are or you fall face first into a swimming pool (there way have been more endings but to be honest I really didn’t want to have to sit through it again and again, especially as it’s date scenes are unskippable).

So this brings us up to today. Obviously I didn’t particularly want these two UMDs, and there was absolutely no way in hell I was going to try and bring them through customs, so I had to get rid of them. I didn’t particularly care on getting my money back on them, so I just took them to the first second hand game shop I visited … well, second actually. I go in the first one too often to have them forever know me as “that perverted git-bag”. Going that extra step to avoid future face to face contact with the shop I was selling to, I ended up visiting a shop in 桃山台 (Momoyamadai), a good hour north of Umeda (not just for this, I was also visiting a mate) getting 100 yen (69p) for each of the games. I was going to just think of it as me renting them at that kind of price that I ended up parting with, but then I just remembered it cost 680 yen (£4.71) to get there and back.

What a load of bollocks.