“Face training” is on sale here in Japan. I’ve already seen two nice office ladies playing in the train while commuting. “Face training” is one of those weird games that are launched in Japan once in a while and never get exported. “Face training” is not really a game, is a system that let’s you improve your facial expression. The game comes with a camera, and while you play the camera recognizes your face, if you are smiling or not, if you are making a “nice” angry face and gives you advice to improve your expressions.
Takahashi Meijin – (高橋名人) is a Japanese video game legend. He is a guru working at “Hudson Soft” , a company where he is working since a long time ago.
Takahashi Meijin is famous for his fast trigger finger when playing video games, he can push a video game controller 16 times per second!. He is also famous because he is the main character in a video game called Takahashi Meijin no Bouken Jima (Takahashi Meijin’s adventure island). You don’t recognize that game right? Look at the next picture carefully:
The t-shirt’s character is the protagonist of Adventure Island, and the guy wearing it is Takahashi Meijin, don’t they look like similar? 😉 The game’s Japanese name was Takahashi Meijin’s adventure island, but since Takahashi was not famous abroad it was decided to translate it as Adventure Island
His fame as a “gamer” reached its zenith when he played against Mouri Meijin in a special TV show. They played Star Soldier, but the best thing of the TV show was the beginning, it became a video game pop culture classic in Japan. Next you can watch the beginning of the show, it features the training that Takahashi Meijin y Mouri Meijin did before playing Star Soldier.
The most famous moment starts from the first minute, when Takahashi breaks a watermelon using his legendary finger movement.
Are you better than Takahashi, can you break a watermelon with your finger, can you do more than 16 pushes per second? You can try using this flash game, I managed to do around 100 in one minute. Next video shows Takahashi’s technique, look how fast he moves his finger! if you don’t look carefully you don’t even notice the movement.
In Japan there are many game centers where you can find all kinds of weird arcades. In the big ones there is always a “horse simulation machine” where many people can join the same game, make their bets and watch the race on a big screen or observing little-horse-figures moving on some kind of scenario.
In this video you can see one of the machines with horse figures.
These pictures are from one of the latest machines from Konami. Look at the guy in the last picture, he is reading manga! while the simulator is showing the final results.
