FFXI has been interesting over the last couple of days. On the morning of the 28th, the servers were busier than I'd seen them before - not with the expected wave of new American players but with current players waiting to catch a glimpse of the first gaijin newbies to arrive. People were sitting, huddled together in groups around Windurst chatting about it. America-jin spotting had become a spectator sport. ^_^; There were suggestions that Square-Enix should have turned it into some kind of official event.

The U.S. launch seems to have gone quite well. The servers don't seem to have been overwhelmed as some pessimists were expecting. Player numbers are up significantly, but as I said before, a sizable proportion of that can be attributed to the curiosity of existing players. The latest version up on the 28th saw the addition of phrase-book-like functionality to the speech-macro menu. When a player selects something to say from the menu, it is translated through a simple one-to-one lookup to the language of each player's client, making it possible for English and Japanese players to communicate to a reasonable extent in the game. At least for the purposes of partying and beating up small woodland creatures.

I've been a little busy this past week. Today, however, I've had a chance to relax again. This morning, I spent a couple of hours sorting through all of the doujinshi I brought back from Japan. Lots more cute to add to the collection. ^_^ It's a shame that good doujinshi is so hard to get outside Japan. Japanese companies won't export, domestic companies won't import and the eBayers only sell pr0n. T_T There are so many slated for this winter's Comike (65) that I want to get my hands on. I guess I'll just have to wait until next year.

I've also been playing a bit of Majokko A-La-Mode. The graphics are great and the scenario, while not being the sort I would normally play (i.e. un-Leaf-like), is still not too bad. It's a fairly happy, laid back story - plenty of fun and humour with only a few depressing, angsty moments. There is also Yuuki, the most ugly character known to man, but I'll save ranting about him until next time. (The image in the link doesn't really do him justice. You have to see him close up to fully 'appreciate' the horror of Yuuki.) As with a lot of popular series released in the last few years which claim Harry Potter (-_-) as the main source of inspiration (e.g. Ultra Maniac), aspects of Ms. Rowling's stories are noticable, but since most of the offending elements (the characters) have been removed, I have no objections to the game. Apart from the occasional, random sex orgy that the creators add to remind me how much they hate me, but since those can be dealt with through use of the scenario skip button, they can also be safely ignored.

... Unless you happen to be one of the PERVERTS who comes to this site through a search engine. This month's queries have been some of the "best" yet. For the curious, here's a top 5 of search engine queries that people used to get to BBI over the last month:

I am seriously considering checking the HTTP request headers for BBI and redirecting all page requests with queries containing choice words such as "pron" and "lolicon" to a page of rants...

Before I go, I'd just like to apologise for the last BBI post I made. I have a site rule that all pages should display correctly at a minimum screen resolution of 800x600 (given a reasonable configuration of font sizes, etc.). The graphic I uploaded as part of the last log entry was far too wide but I only noticed this yesterday. The graphic has now been resized and all should be well again. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Phew. After the dullness of last weekend, the last few days have been pretty hectic. However, I now have a bit of time to myself so I thought I should finally get around to doing a proper update - the first since I got back from Japan over two weeks ago.

We got back on the evening of Wednesday the 8th. Amazingly, there were almost no problems with the hotel/hostel bookings or transportation between the locations we were staying at. I was dreading the thought of turning up to one of the hotels only to find out that our booking had been lost. I think that on the whole, everyone enjoyed themselves - we didn't kill each other at any rate. Dragging 8 people (9 at one point) around Japan for a month was never going to be easy but we managed it.

About a week after I got back, Kotoko, my main workstation, had to endure a Windows re-install after the previous installation of Windows 98 fell apart completely. She now has a shiny new installation of Windows 2000, which seems to have about the same number of problems as the Windows 98 installation, only in places that fortunately don't effect the things I do too much. The ATI Rage IIc had to come out because it caused an IRQ conflict with my network card under Win2K for some reason (good old MS PnP). I replaced it with the Matrox Mystique that Mint once had in her previous life as a desktop workstation and everything was fine again.

Re-installing was an interesting experience. Windows itself took a little under half an hour to install. Next up were various hardware drivers which also installed without any problems. Application software - Office and so forth - took a little longer, but also proved non-problematic. The real fun started when I came to install Final Fantasy XI (or Final Patch XI as I now sometimes refer to it). The first problem I encountered was with the initial install from CD. After reinstalling Windows, I had forgotten to re-enable DMA-mode on my IDE controllers (disabled by default). The difference had not been that noticable when installing the couple of hundred megabytes of MS Office, but the six FFXI CDs made for a painfully slow 2 hours of copying data from the CD-ROM drive to the hard disk, both devices fighting over who got to use the controller.

The fun wasn't over yet though. Quite the opposite - it had hardly begun. One of the good things about Final Fantasy XI is that the staff at Square-Enix don't sit around all day doing nothing. They actually work hard to improve their software and this is passed on to the player in the form of frequent software updates (or "version-ups" as they like to call them). Unfortunately, working from 6-month-old installation media meant that the software I had was somewhat dated. Starting POL resulted in the client downloading patches for a good 40 minutes. All of the POL content data was also waaay out of date, which meant that for the first couple of days, every new thing I clicked on lead to a 5 minute download.

And then... Final Fantasy XI. I'm not going to say much about that because I think the screenshot below speaks for itself.

1907 files to download. And yes, it really did take over 10 hours.

It will be interesting to see what happens to the world of Vana'diel over the next two weeks. As most readers with an interest in gaming will probably be aware, the U.S. version of Final Fantasy XI launches in two days (October 28th). The U.S. website is now up and running and Square-Enix have been furiously patching the servers in preparation. While U.S./U.K. customers will no doubt be pleased that a domestic version of the game is now available, the responses from those currently using the service seems mixed. On the one hand, many people are looking forward to a wave of new users to play with. Then there are those who worry that the servers will become overcrowded, that the game will slowly become English-only, or that the dungeons will be overrun by thousands of loud, power-levelling U.S. teenagers.

I can sympathise with the existing players to some extent. While there are plenty of non-Japanese users already playing, the U.S. release will almost certainly result in an English-speaking majority on the servers. Or rather, that barely-comprehensible, English-like drivel that most 'English'-speaking teenagers seem to use online - increased exposure to which I wouldn't wish upon anyone. However, as for the concerns about server overcrowding, I really don't think there's too much to worry about. While the Final Fantasy name will no doubt draw in a large number of gamers (compared to lesser-known P2P MMORPGs such as Ragnarok Online), the world of Vana'diel is very expansive and should have no problems with capacity. Square-Enix has enough servers in place and the infrastructure and funding to install more as and when they are needed.

I don't have much time to play games this week, but what little time I have had has been spent on iRO since their Halloween event has already started and FFXI's hasn't. ^_^

Still on the subject of Final Fantasy, Square-Enix finally have a site up for FF12. Not much information as of yet - even the intro uses the same concept art we've seen time and time again, but the creation of the site does at least reassure fans that the development teams are hard at work. We'll just have to wait until after the presentation to hear what the various gaming publications have to say. It seems as if Square-Enix still have a lot of work to do so I don't anticipate a release any earlier than 2004Q2.

On to Leaf news now. While we're waiting for more information on the next big Leaf project, a few recent Leaf games, namely Routes and Utawarerumono, are being re-released on DVD. The DVD edition of Routes will hit the stores on November 28th with Utawarerumono following sometime in December. According to the information I have, the DVD versions will include event CG not in the original games. Other Leaf releases to look forward to include the next Leaf Vocal Collection album. LVC Volume 3 will be released on November 28th - surprisingly early since Volume 2 was only released a month ago today.

Sticking with music, I've updated their website last month to coincide with the the release of their 4th and 5th compilation albums (Lament and Out Flow). There's also a small page promoting Kotoko's first solo album, due Spring 2004.

And finally, something completely different. While we were in Japan, a couple of party members insisted on trying seachicken onigiri. I've never been too sure exactly what seachicken is. It looks like tuna and smells like tuna... but it's called seachicken. I always buy tins labeled tuna since I know what tuna is and I like to know what I'm eating. Eventually, the inevitable question was raised and the group came up with numerous suggestions. Was it fish? Was it chicken? Was it some kind of freaky genetic hybrid? Upon returning to the UK, I investigated seachicken more thoroughly and discovered that the term has been used all over the world to describe various oceanic inhabitants, although crabs and tuna do seem to be the most popular recipients of the name. Hagoromo Foods has a whole page describing the contents of its seachicken product range. Apparently, they use bonito, yellowfin tuna or albacore, depending on the type of seachicken (flakey, chunky, etc.) you buy.

Okay... I can tell you're bored now so I'll stop there. I'll try and improve the flow of the next post to make it a little more readable. Today was more of a ramble than anything else. Gomen ne.

Sorry once again for the lack of updates. I haven't abandoned BBI; I just don't feel like posting anything at the moment. BBI is my site of happy, cute things and it's hard to post when I'm not in a happy, cute mood.

Anyway, so as not to waste precious seconds of your lives on an otherwise pointless post, I'll post a link to a competition being organised by the OPN (Open Programmers Network) and brought to my attention by NullS. If you're a student of undergraduate level or lower and algorithmic problem solving is your thing, take a look.

Well, we're nearly at the end of our almost-a-month in Japan. It's been good fun and everyone seems to have enjoyed themselves. Much money has been spent and there will be many credit cards debts to pay off. :) The flight back to the U.K. leaves tomorrow morning and should get in around 6pm on Wednesday evening. I'm not sure how soon I'll be back online after that though as the word from home is that the cable box has died again. Anyway, with luck, I will next be speaking to you from the U.K. - whenever that may be. Until then, take care. ^^

2000 visits! Thanks, you've made Tomoko-chan very happy. ^_^

We've reached Osaka now. The plan for the day is to head into Den-Den Town and partake in a shopping marathon. Sounds like fun. I hope everyone is fine back home. I keep checking by Aniverse at various times but no-one ever seems to be online. If you've changed servers or something, perhaps you could drop me an email. Anyhoo, see you soon.