Casual Gamers Hell

Well lately my posts have been spread pretty thin, like the last scraping of butter from the tub. Just like that very same butter, it’s very hard for this post to cover everything I’ve got to mention, so I’ll be brief.

Firstly, Rondo of Swords for the Nintendo DS. It’s a neat little strategy / rpg-ish game. Set in your standard fantasy world with fairly standard characters (actually, they’re far more cliche than that, but it’s ok because of the pure class). I’d say there are probably two things that come to mind about this game. Firstly is one of the characters will hit on every single girl he comes across in the game. That’s what really endeared me to the game to be honest.

Surrounded by enemies, your own life bar reduced to a sliver like the progress bar of your computer trying to defrag itself and scan for viruses at the same time, this guy still has time to pull one liners in the most casual way. Pure bond. Unfortunately the responses he gets aren’t usually so positive…

The other thing is that this game dares to be unintuitive in a time, and on a platform where being intuitive and ‘casual friendly’ is the same as being available in stores. There isn’t a particularly steep learning curve, and the tutorials will have you rolling pretty quickly… but if you try to move up to an enemy and THEN attack him… well too bad for you.

Ok, now that’s out of the way…  My experience with the Microsoft support line in Japan.  WOW.  This it worth a post all of its own.  Infact I might save most of it for its own post when the deal is finally done.  For the time being I’ll tell you about the call I tried to make.  This was AFTER Rika had called and failed to get help.  She’s a native Japanese speaker, I’m not.  I can speak a bit and understand a lot more, but for things like getting support I generally found people will go out of their way a bit more if they can’t just give you the company lines.

I called and was given a set of ‘push this button to continue’ style menus.  I bungled through the first THREE, then gave up and kept pressing 0 until it started dialing for a human.  I said “Excuse me, I need help with my xbox 360, my Japanese is very poor, can you help me?”

He went on to tell me in the bluntest of Japanese that ‘this is Japan’ and if I was going to speak English, then he wasn’t going to be able to help me.  In Japanese it’s very easy to tell when somebody’s being polite or not. *sigh*

Ok, finally games are on for this weekend.  Can I shotgun Sunday afternoon?