Yukkuri hanashi te kudasai

I've been expanding my cultural horizon in regards to Japanese culture. By that I mean that I've bought a Sony Playstation 2, and been hearing some Japanese music.

The Playstation was of course a necessity for my education, just as I had to buy Homers Odyssey when I studied Litterature, and thus was an unfortunate but required expense *sigh*.

But even though it pained me to purchase, I've decided to get the best from it, and have been playing some titles I've been wanting to play for a long time, but couldn't, because they were only for PS2. My verdict on the PS2 is - it Rocks! I've been enjoying myself immensly, and particularily the fact, that I don't have to wonder how well a game title will run on my system, because they are all made for exactly my system specs. Goodbye worries about graphic cards, RAM, CPU speed, harddisk space, drivers, hello happy carefree gaming.
That being said, here is some of my top recommendations:

This game comes with a guitar controller, and was actually the main reason I bought a PS2. Attentive readers will remember me raving about playing this game at ITU. It's still one of my favorite games for PS2. I had to stop playing it for a couple of days, because I'd gotten blisters on my fingers (!). Guitar Hero 2 will be out in november, one of the new features im looking forward to is cooperative mode with different guitar feeds, that means one player playing lead for example, and the other playing bass. I'm there...


We Love Katamari is a Japanese game in the truest meaning. The objective of the game is to roll a ball around, absorbing small pieces in your ball, thereby making it bigger. The small pieces are stuff like crayons, buttons and ducks! When you're ball grows, you can absorb bigger and bigger things, like people, bears, trees and eveuntally countries! The gameplay is brilliant and original, and besides the gameplay is a hilarious story with some very funny characters and an excellent Japanese soundtrack. Feel-good game of the millenium.


God of War is an excellent extremely well polished action-adventure game. The setting is ancient Greece, a setting that the game captures very well. The gameplay is pretty straightforward hack-n-slash, but it just feels excellent, there are also small minigames that are very well done, for example a minigame might be to kill a minotaur, or to rip the head of a Medusa. Yes the game is very bloody and violent, and we all know that blood is cool. The cutscenes in the game are extremely beautiful, and the story is very engaging.

I've played many other titles, but these stand above the rest.

Now, for Japanese music there is a tiny festival going on right now called: Tokyo Sound Revolution. A 2 day festival taking place in Lille Vega, Copenhagen, with free entrance. I caught the shows yesterday, and had an excellent time in care of Pepe California and Ego-Wrappin'. Here are some impressions from the show, the video is in very poor quality, but gives the general idea.


Ego-Wrappin, is a jazz band, with elements from other genres. Their biggest asset was definitely this tiny woman, who was a real firecracker on stage.










Pepe California is what I guess you'll call Japanese dream pop, with a very strong electronical taste and some post-rock elements. The music was absolutely hypnotizing.