By now, many on the Internet have heard the story of Nasubi (“eggplant” in Japanese), the Japanese comedian and unwitting game show participant on Denpa Shonen that endured nearly a year of total isolation and nudity during his time on the show. Forced to fulfill the mandated goal of winning 1,000,000 Yen through the constant entering of various contests, Nasubi was broadcast on television with little more than an eggplant graphic carefully following his genitals on-screen most of the time. (It should—or maybe shouldn’t—be noted that during the course of the show, however, he did win a contest for women’s underwear which he unsuccessfully tried on.)

Really, though, that’s not the story here. The story is that they actually turned the slowly degenerating mental faculties of this poor guy into a game—and a simulation, no less. Given the high ratings for the show, the bright minds at Hudson (a major Japanese game developer and publisher) decided to bring the experience of slow-simmered insanity to gamers’ homes in “Nasubi no Heya” (aka Denpa Shounen-teki Kenshou Seikatsu: Nasubi no Heya, a mouthful to be sure) for the Sega Dreamcast.

Let’s just get this straight; this was a game that mimicked the activities of Nasubi’s day. This generally consisted of a few things (if the show was any indication):

• Entering dozens of contests
• Talking to yourself
• Eating (provided food was available)
• Sleeping
• Finding a suitable place place to defecate
• Writing
• Prancing around in women’s underwear once in a while
• Lots of waiting

Stranger still, the game had an ‘on-line mode’ where if you won items in the game during a specified time and punched in the code number on the Nasubi no Heya website, you too earned the chance win prizes. That is, of course, if you hadn’t offed yourself by then from the sheer banality of it.

The first few rounds of videogame sales have gone pretty well so far. One buyer enlisted himself to help me out about a week ago, which I’m pretty thankful for as he’s been able to find quite a few serious collectors interested in my items. (He’s being rewarded nicely.) I’ve definitely reaped more than I’d planned to in this short amount of time, but then again, I’m really letting some rarities go that I haven’t in the past.

Shipping every order out has proven to be quite the workout, between finding enough boxes — and of the right size, no less — to fill orders, getting everything packaged, and almost-daily walks to the USPS during lunch. I have another big round of shipments I have to make tomorrow, in fact.

The next few rounds should certainly prove even more clutter-reducing, with a few more systems and a lot more games on the line. I’m still keeping a good portion of my collection, but I’m really paring down the variety of systems and their games I have in order to keep things more orderly and focused. In any case, I already see the difference in the amount of space I have available, and the money, well, it’s not bad either.

The /gaming and /link sections have gone boom. Honestly, it’s about time I pared down to something a bit more modest since I haven’t the time to keep especially the /gaming section moving. It’s still accessible by the search engines for posterity and the sake of anyone searching games using Google, but it will no longer be updated.

I’ve made a few other changes, but they’re not very notable.

Onto another subject, the Axis 2120 arrived yesterday and really is a great piece of kit. Installation took five minutes, a firmware upgrade took another five minutes, and the configuration took another 30 since I insisted on messing around with controls and settings. Outside of the live feed — which I’m sure as hell not linking here — the standalone 2120 also uploads a current photo every 30 seconds via FTP, which you can now see to the right.

My only complaint so far is that I won’t be able to easily mount it in order to zoom in on the skyline, but I’ll work past that eventually with some ingenuity and an 802.11g wireless bridge.

Most of my concentration as of late has been on the Gaming section of the site, adding reviews for Trauma Center: Under the Knife and Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, both of which are wonderful and original additions to the Nintendo DS lineup. I’ll be getting back to the meat of operation 9 here again soon after I complete the upgrade to TXP 4.0.1.

In the meantime, have a little play with this interesting demo from 1991 I found in some old DOS disks I pored through the other night. This is the Superscape Virtual Reality Demo, and using a DOS emulator such as DOSBox, you can blast back to the day when true 3D graphics as we know them today were still in their infancy. To be honest, I haven’t found this demo anywhere else on the Internet, so this is a rare one indeed.

The second download is a package of old screen savers from the mid-to-late 80s. These were true predecessors to modern-day graphics and visualizations everyone takes for granted in everything from iTunes and Winamp, to the venerable-and-late After Dark. Most of them are small productions and won’t be found anywhere else on the ‘net, but are well worth the time to take a look at.

Download: SSDemo.zip [106kb, ZIP]

Download: OldScreenSavers.zip [334kb, ZIP]