Week

Monday

Looking at Mr. Endo and think for the first time, "Is that a wig?"

Despite having 8 hours sleep last I still couldn't get up this morning and I'm still tired now.

It takes the students a shocking amount of time to decide their favourite food, singer and movie, and write down their own birthday. Some of the girls seem on the verge of tears.

New laptops and printers are installed in the staff-room. I now have two printers on "my" desk.

Tuesday

Three identical lessons which are/is boring. Read, read and wait for repetition, read something else. One kid talks while I read so I give him a stone cold stare and the class falls into a devastating silence. Help three students in each class with the writing because that's all there is time for. Many students write nothing, not even their own names. "Do you know your own name?"

Wednesday

I want to poo but the toilet is way too cold. Some idiot always leaves a window wide open despite the fact there's a functioning extractor fan in there. It feels like an open air toilet. I think the poo will hold position but there's still two hours of work to go.

Thursday

Watch 24. Watch Monday Night Raw. Watch myself crying in the mirror not sure if I'm faking it or not.

Friday

It's graduation and I'm wearing a suit and sitting behind the vice principal which feels important but I don't know any of the students in the third grade except one and I'm worried that I can be seen on the projected live video feed because I just scratched myself.

The most moving part of the ceremony was when the handicapped kids got their papers and looked absolutely terrified the entire time. They botched the timing of the bow but no-one cared. Everyone should've realised something important about life at this point but no-one did, including me.

It's over and I'm hungry but I'm worried the sushi will be bad. It's okay. The male teachers sit around the extra helpings box and raid it. The women wash the dishes afterwards. Somewhere a baby cries.

The third graders are waiting to leave and I find the one girl I actually know so I can say good-bye. She doesn't seem interested in talking which upsets me because she said we were friends. Flashback to my high school days and now I'm depressed. Hang around the students so it doesn't look like I only came down to talk to one girl, which I did. Say congratulations to some boys but they respond "No, we're next year." This makes me look totally insincere, which I am. Take some pictures with students, mostly (all?) girls and leave.

Bayonetted

It's pretty amazing that I didn't write a single blog for all of 2009. I genuinely intended to write on this regularly and have it as a personal record of Japan. I think that's what my pictures on Facebook have become. So much has happened since I last wrote here... and none of it will be discussed now.

This is a review for the Playstation 3 game "Bayonetta" that I wrote while I was wasted and put on a forum.
Opinions follow.
Summary
Simultaneous simplicity and depth in the combat system combine with sufficient enemy variety and game-play twists to make a very enjoyable game-play experience. This is undermined by a disastrous story which lacks a decent plot and interesting characters. Cut-scenes are embarrassingly over the top - slapstick comedy and farcical action apparently passing for "style". Load times drag down the overall presentation and quality of the product.
Actual Review
The game-play (as you'll know if you've read anything about Bayonetta) follows the same model as games like Devil May Cry and God of War. You walk into a room, some monsters show up, you kill them, and walk to the next room. The variety of enemies is good, some requiring different strategies to defeat, which stops things getting too repetitive. I really liked the combat system. You can keep things simple and stick to easy combos, or you can remember the longer more complex combos, which require pausing for a specific amount of time between button presses. It's very smooth and responsive, I liked it more than Devil May Cry 4 (even though I only played the demo, it was too hard). The obligatory massive boss fights are here, which to my surprise where pretty fun. They give you time to get in there and beat the crap out of the boss rather than make you dodge cheap attacks over and over again while you grind your teeth down to nothing. Naked climax attacks are fun, but don't worry - all the naughty bits are covered by swirling hair.
It's not all walking around and fighting though, there is a sequence in which you ride a motorbike down a seemingly endless motorway. This is fun, even though the animations for the bike are a bit basic and the controls seem slack because the bike moves so ridiculously fast. The change of pace is good and it's always nice to blow up cars and jump over collapsing bridges. Another similar sequence has you controlling a massive missile flying across the sea, you shoot guys and fire missiles which is very nice but again the thing doesn't seem very polished.
The word on this game is that it has "style". This is true. But there is a difference between "style" and throwing a bunch of ideas together without any apparent unifying theme or stylistic ideal. One minute I'm hanging out with some fowl mouthed American people driving around and swearing being hip, then I'm walking around a medieval European town with nice Cathedrals, then I'm wondering around in a floating dreamy nonsense place, then I'm back in the modern world jumping around skyscrapers. I had no idea where I was supposed to be at any point in the game. Even though there's a little animation between chapters showing you move around a map, I still had no clue. Is this game a modern-day gothic comedy or a biblical epic? There's so much stuff happening at the same time with no transitions or consistent idea, notion, or concept that I totally lost interest in what Bayonetta was doing. It just became a bunch of totally random locations that could all have been pulled from totally different games. What is the design ethos here? What ties all this stuff together? Nothing. Bayonetta looks decent enough, and the individual parts of the game are nice, but it doesn't come together into one coherent package.
And that's saying nothing about what actually happens in these locations. Bayonetta has the dumbest cut-scenes I have ever seen. If this is what passes for stylish in Japanese games then something is very wrong. All the humour in this game is based on people falling over, things falling on or near people, and female body parts. I challenge you to play this game and find a gag that does not involve one of these things. It's not funny, not even in an ironic way. This is the absolute most basic level of slapstick comedy and I was embarrassed to be watching it. When the movies aren't trying to be funny they force to watch endless sequences with Bayonetta fighting a million guys in fantastically over-the-top battles that had me thinking "Why am I not killing those guys myself? Why am I watching a terrible video of fights I should be enjoying?" Each of these clips features at least one slo-motion shot of Bayonetta's buttocks, and you can almost hear the director saying "phwooar"and touching himself. Again, embarrassing. Bayonetta surfing through lava on someone's corpse through lava sounds cool yeah? Not after you've been watching Bayonetta fly around pointlessly for five hours talking about nothing.
The story is a total disaster - Bayonetta has amnesia, kills some angels, eventually meets the last boss who explains everything, then Bayonetta goes home. That's it. Each chapter Bayonetta meets a massive monster and says "Tell me something", the monster says "Cryptic nonsense cryptic nonsense lalala" then you kill the monster. If you're going to have such a bad story with no good characters or any story development, why even bother? Why make people suffer through these agonising cut-scenes in which nothing of any value or interest is said? I'm not kidding. The last boss explains the entire back-story and the main story in one massive boring speech at the end of the game, you can skip everything else.
Loading... Loading... Loading... is something I'm seeing too much. If the developers knew there was going to be this much loading, couldn't they have had the decency to use a naked picture of Bayonetta as the loading screen instead of the word "Loading"?

• To start each chapter you get a massive load, albeit one with a useful practice room
• The pause needs a load
• The weapons and items menu (select button) need a load, then a separate load for each tab, weapons, info etc.
• The less than ten second clip of a Bayonetta doll moving from one location to another on a map has its own loading time, which is as long as the animation itself.
• Picking up an item will bring up an image of it, this image has to be loaded. You look at the picture for less time than the load
• The chapter select screen needs to loaded after the doll-on-the-map clip despite the fact its really just text and a picture.
• The item and weapon shop needs takes as much time to load as an entire level of the game
• There is loading mid-game. For example a train slides toward you from behind by surprise, but not before the game stops to load this "surprise" event.
• The load screens have load screens.

All this drags down the overall experience. Not enough to make me hate the game, I'm still going to play through the chapters again and improve my score while I'm still sane. However the quality of the product is affected, the level of the professionalism and polish isn't as high as something like Uncharted 2. Maybe there were budget issues, but I expect more for 7000yen