First, the game; A true-blue puzzle game, “Me and the Key” (playable at http://www.kongregate.com/games/bontegames/me-and-the-key) is an 26 level instructionless excursion into the world of problem solving with a pleasing aesthetic fit for any age group and the sort of soundtrack that effortlessly seeps into your subconcious.

Focusing on sheer gameplay, this little bit of software does a lot of things right. The mechanics of the game are very intuitive, relying almost exclusively on variations of pointing and clicking on the various objects on stage. The fun comes from figuring out how to solve various puzzles, and as the game progresses the frustration encountered by some of these confouned levels is only eclipsed by that smug, “I’m so smart” feeling that comes with figuring out the solution all on your own. There’s still a very good mix of gameplay, with different levels requiring greater levels of skill or creative thinking to move onwards, but they balance out to keep gameplay far from repetitive. While this sort of game does not have a lot of inherent replay value, it is an extremely fun way to spend twenty to thirty minutes of your time and is completely free to play!

This is one of the greatest selling points of flash games as an e-product; Unlike various game consoles or even software purchased for mobile devices which require up to sixty dollars of cash for the right to play a game on top of whatever is used to buy the hardware necessary to run the game, these flash games posted on the internet are free of all charge to play. In addition to accessibility to the user comes accessibility to the developers, as just one talented individual can create a new and fun product in just a matter of weeks, rather than enormous teams of programmers and artists taking months and millions of dollars to develop one title for an Xbox or PS3. And sheer fun that comes with playing these games is clearly rivalling that of applications on any other platform, what with estimates from 2007 placing the value of the industry at 2.25 billion dollars and various titles that debuted as online flash games making appearances in consoles and mobile devices alike.

But there is more to the success story of the casual gaming market than the free, fun distractions from day to day life like “Me and the Key”. Indeed there is an entire infrastructure dedicated to supporting developers and herding users into a big ol’ happy casual gaming community. An excellent example of one of these portal sites is Kongregate (www.kongregate.com).

For much of its history, Kongregate was little more than what its name might suggest; An online location for developers to congregate and for eager users to flock to participate in free online games. A recipie for consistent traffic, Kongregate has done a lot more to make the site an attractive place for developers and gamers alike, making it one of the most successful portals on the internet, notorious enough to be featured in articles in the Wall Street Journal and Time Magazine.

Firstly, Kongregate (which generates much of its cashflow by ad revenue) shares the money that ads generate with developers; a lucrative offer, since there is already such great traffic on the site, and actually allows developers to maintain full rights to their games (providing them with the opportunity to also host their games on other sites, increasing their own personal revenue). Furthermore, monthly competitions offer cash prizes of up to $1500 to the developers of especially popular games, offering further incentive for developers to put quality content on their site.

Kongregate also tries to make the game more appealing to the typical gamer; besides hosting a number of sophisticated multiplayer and chat services and effectively organizing games based on their user ratings and genres, Kongregate also regularly includes achievements in the forms of “badges” for attaining milestones in various popular games that increase a sort of casual gamerscore (which is remarkably effective at motivating a gamer to pick up a game from a genre that they might normally stray away from). What’s more, getting badges in featured games may also frequently result in the gamer receiving collectable Kongai cards, a competitive card game developed by the Kongregate staff that is also played on their site.

All in all it is an environment very friendly to newcomers to the game development business, and what’s friendly to the game developers is good for game players! And it’s also a new, growing and exciting development in the world of gaming that is worth keeping an eye on in in the near future. Or at the very least worth visiting the next time you’ve got ten minutes to kill and you’re at a computer.

After our deer and temple related adventures on Miyajima it’s safe to say we were all in a pretty good mood. Which is why we hopped on a train to the Hiroshima peace park to utterly depress everyone.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s a beautiful park with all sorts of important history and some of the most meaningful displays of emotion I’ve ever seen. But it is impossible to walk away from that museum feeling good about yourself, regardless of what country you’ve come from. It was a good reminder of how terrible atomic weapons are, and why it’s critically important that the world finds a way to live without the threat of these weapons wiping out civilizations. But the sights of this trip will speak more powerfully than I ever could.

Our first stop of the day was Miyajima island. For those unfamiliar with the geography of Japan, it’s a little island to the south and west of Osaka. It also happens to be contention for the most beautiful place I have ever been.

A bullet train ride to a 15 minute ferry trip and we were on the island and we were quickly greeted by the islands… inhabitants. I’ll let the pictures tell the rest of the story.

P.S I hope you all understand why all of this has been taking so long after you view this gallery. This has been massively trimmed down and it still has almost 200 pictures in it alone.

We got up nice and early on Saturday to head to the Ginza district of Tokyo. Ginza is commonly known to be the much more upper crust area of Tokyo, and shopping there you’ll find many sorts of stores that are familiar and typically expensive. We went there to go to a MSU Alumnis party in Japan, where we were able to meet many ex-spartans currently employed in Japan. It was great to meet so many new people, some of whom were actually going to be returning to MSU in the fall! I came away with some business cards and business contacts that I hope to keep alive as I move through school and into my professional career.

So after our brief tour of the remarkable architecture of Ginza and a morning spent in a small lounge with alums and other Spartans on a various study abroad programs we went to Tokyo station to board the Shinkansen, or Japanese bullet train.

We had bought a JR (Japan Rail) weeklong pass before getting to Japan. Turns out that you can only get one if you aren’t a Japanese citizen! Weird. But it was extremely convenient, as the coming days would readily demonstrate. Owning a pass allows for unlimited access on two of the three types of Shinkansen trains, and any normal train line owned by JR. Which was great, because that Saturday was to be the first day we’d use it.

After packing the stuff we needed, and some unnecessary hassle with tickets we arrived at the station and took our long ride into Osaka. Wasn’t much time to do a lot else that day except eat, so we had a small dinner (either at a convenience store or one of the Japanese fast food places, I don’t remember) and got to bed with the knowledge that we had an exceptionally busy day and an early wakeup call to visit Miyajima island and Hiroshima.

Much of day 5 was spent in exploration of the traditional market district of Tokyo: Asakusa. It was obvious that we were in a very different part of Tokyo, even from the enormous tile mural of an ancient festival positioned inside of the metro station. We climbed the stairs and into what seemed like another world.

The first sights that greeted us were buddhist monks in their traditional garb and rickshaw drivers in similarly old-school fashions. Between the size and sensibility of our group to not seek the assistance of a man in a diaper pulling a cart, we chose to walk the short distance to the main market street leading to Sennoji Temple.

We turned the corner onto the street and my jaw dropped to the floor. The gate to the market street must have been tall as a three or four story building made entirely of wood, housing enormous bronzed statues of a warrior and demon respectively. Fortunately the gate was just for show; anybody can come and go as they please to the truly unique part of this district of Tokyo; the market!

Passing through the gate and as far as the eye can see, the street was lined with small shops. Some generalized and others finely specialized in selling only a few particular crafts, but almost all focused on selling the sorts of goods that were reminiscient of Japanese history. Katanas, Kimonos and Karate outfits battled for shop space with paper fans and traditional “lucky cat” figurines. It was the first time since I was in Japan that I bought a souveneir for somebody in mind (specifically my father) and it was certainly not the last time I would visit this place; Even with an entire morning to explore, we later came to realize that we’d completely missed entire sidestreets full of even more exciting stores to explore.

After the morning and early afternoon spent in this market (and a delicious if expensive sushi lunch), the majority of our class left to go and watch the Sumo wrestling competition being held nearby. However, between the cost for the few hours of viewing (50 dollars a person) and my previous experiences watching sumo wrestling I decided I would rather save that money and take the opportunity to catch up on my blog and headed home with a few other similarly minded students. Catching up on my blog rapidly turned into catching up on my sleep as it turned out, and before I knew it I was out.

But I awoke refreshed and ready to go out with my group of friends, successfully leading us to a traditional Japanese restraunt and ordering a meal of Japanese fried chicken for us. Delicious, yet small in portion and again relatively expensive (I left my camera at the hotel room, not realizing where we would end up looking for our dinner). But we stopped at an AMPM convenience store on the way back, the Tokyo equivalent of a grocery store and bought snacks to tide us over for the rest of the night. We went to sleep ready for our last day in our first weeklong stay in Tokyo, and our first ride in a Japanese Bullet Train!

So here’s the plan. I still have a good thousand or so pictures to upload, so I’m going to trim that number down and post short day summaries of each of them to make sense of the comments that go with them. But at the very least I plan to go through the majority of the days I spent in Japan on the study abroad, and include some of the neater parts of Korea. But don’t be surprised if days get left out or shortened because cameras were dead or not much interesting happened (all two of them).

And after Tokyo Tower, we headed out to Harajuku, the fashion district of Tokyo for the youth. I missed a lot of the more insane photos, stores and patrons alike. I may be headed back Thursday or so, it was such a unique experience.

A few of the inventions suggested or in development by NTT seemed somewhat frivilous, such as the office desk had scent receptors that could (with a few more miracles of science that have yet to occur) allow people to email smells to each other. Was that really problem before now?

However, most of the goods we saw were as convenient and practical as they were absolutely genius in their design. For example, a large ring to be worn around the finger that accurately measured the rhythms tapped out by ones fingers, and then based on the rhythm you tapped out, the ring sent a command to any number of devices it was connected to. This mechanism was demonstrated by turning on TV screens, turning off the lights, and unlocking/unlocking a door. Absolutely incredible!

Another fantastic device was a cell phone constructed to play music and conduct the music through the human body to headphones, allowing the user to listen to their music without any cords on their headphones. The signal was powerful enough that not only could the phone transmit through clothes, but even travel through other people allowing somebody to listen to a song on their friends phone by touching them. Similarly there was another ring like device that attached to the finger, and caused it to vibrate with the frequency of some radio station, allowing you to listen to music by touching your forehead or sticking a finger in your ear. Super cool!

The list of cutting edge technologies in use at DoCoMo goes on and on, especially when it came to their use of holograms for shopping and communications (allowing you to view clothes on a 3D hologram of whomever you were buying them for without putting them on, even if they weren’t in the room), but for the sake of brevity I’ll cut it short here. After some more thoroughly wow-ing experiences there we went on to have a quick lunch in company cafeterias. and before we knew it we were on our way again to the heart of Yokohama to attend a tea ceremony. I really liked the scenery of Yokohama; every bit as impressive as Tokyo with the size and splendor of individual skyscrapers and yet less cluttered and hectic than its more densely populated counterpart. We headed to a massive corporate hotel that stretched for 70 floors and housed an entire top of the line mall in its lower levels, where we met for the Tea ceremony.

To be honest, the experience was interesting and the setting of our accomidations was spectacular; the traditional style Japanese style home, and the backdrop of the cityscape was incredible; we were up high enough to get a birds eye view of some helicopter landings on narby rooftop helipads, with a view almost completely unobstructed for miles and miles.

As for the tea ceremony itself however… well, it left something to be desired in my book. We shared the ceremony with a small family from North Carolina and we were herded into a room that was comparable to the typical American living room. The complete absence of furniture made it easier to squeeze everyone in (about 20 people with the family and tea ceremony people), but left us packed like sardines in the traditional kneeling position that is horribly uncomfortable if you haven’t practiced it. We also had to wait a good deal for everyone in our crowd to get served, and the few traditional sweets they handed out while we waited ranged from average to tasting like cardboard. At last we got to sip our tea, and it tasted like licking the bottom of a lawnmower. At least everything looked nice and pretty.

But that largely wrapped things up for the activities for the day. I caught train back to Tokyo with Makoto (another project assistant and translator) and he assisted me in creating translations for the titles of the presentation on games and game culture that I was to give at Keio University the following morning.

Worn out but loving Japan, we headed out for another dinner and ended up back in the hotel. Most of the group went to sleep fairly shortly afterwards, but I had a presentation to prepare for, and a fencing club to contact! Emails written and slide titles translated, I headed to bed and day 3 drew to a close.