My imports have arrived! (August 12th, 2007 at 11:04 pm)
Arrived along with them: $17.48 worth of “Taxes and handling”. 
Still, as my first set of Japanese import games EVER!, I was too excited to be pissed when I picked them up on Friday. I bought Rhythm Tengoku, and bit Generation games Coloris and dotstream.
I’ve only played the first two briefly (haven’t touched dotstream yet) but as expected, my thoughts on them are as follows: bonkers. 
Ouch. Unlucky with the duty mate.
There is something uniquely appealing about Jap imports that makes it all worthwhile though. Firstly the games you have to import tend to be games not deemed commercial enough for a western release (which generally means they are ace) and secondly, not understanding a word of the Jap text somehow exaggerates the already crazy, “bonkers” feel of the games. And as an added bonus you don’t have to make do with those crappy westernised soundtracks that they always feel the need to replace the original Jap ones with.
Comment by fog — August 13, 2007 @ 4:36 am
The brief amount of text in the bit generation games seem to be entirely in English, but Rhythm Tengoku is something else!
It really hit home with that marching band minigame. I don’t know if you’ve played it, but I’m lined up with a bunch of other band members, and the conductor is barking out orders … “issghaa meek!”, and I was like, “huh?” but all the other band members turn there heads left … “ahh meek=left, got it!” and it took a while, but I totally know what left, right and march sound like now.
Brings back memories of being yelled at by a certain Arabic teacher and not knowing what the hell he was on about.
Comment by Mobeen — August 13, 2007 @ 8:21 am